Arrived on Flight AA509

at 2:59 pm this afternoon from New York. Airport is a single runway surrounded by
sugarcane fields that stretch in one direction to the ocean then slope up to three volcanic
peaks, the tallest gathering clouds or perhaps letting off smoke/steam (active?) at its peak.
Temp 95 degrees Fahrenheit, 82 percent humidity. Rain on the hot asphalt, engine fuel,
molasses and brine were the first smells to greet me upon disembarking the plane.
Descended wheeled stairs to the tarmac, had to walk through the suffocating heat to the
terminal, sweat appearing on everyones backs and armpits. All the workers are black,
some as blackskinned as seems possible. Barefoot, yellow soled, kids trying to help me
with my luggage. Seemed prudent to refuse. When it was my turn, the customs official
asked me a question in a kind of English I could not understand. What? I asked. The
customs official looked at me as if I had said something rude. Without a word or gesture
from him, two other officials suddenly appeared at his side. They took my bag and asked
me to follow them. I was told to sit on a small, black plastic chair, while my bag was
placed on an aluminum table in front of me. I waited for 46 minutes until the customs
official stopped his duties and came over to me. He raised his hand to capture the
attention of a broad, black woman in a grey government uniform. She came over and
proceeded to open my bag. For several minutes they painstakingly looked through my

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belongings, opening anything that was closed, my toiletries kit, notebooks, then finally
my tape recorder. Can you turn on and play? the official asked slowly and carefully.
Sure, I said and slipped in a tape. With all three of them watching, I pressed the play
button with his wife P and son S, he left Boston for a position at University of C to join
Dr. W who had government support to study neurological basis of violence inSo what
dis for? He asked. A study, I said. student demonstrations soon closed down Turn
dat ting off, the customs official said as he stamped my book, handed it to me and looked
away. Once outside the terminal, cab drivers fought for my fare, arguing it seemed with
each other while pulling at me, young kids again trying to take my luggage, shine my
shoes, offering me an orange local soda. Again I declined and chose a blue beat up taxi
which nearly started a fist fight among the other taxi drivers. Inside the cab the smell of
gasoline, overripe bananas, urine. I asked my lucky driver to take me to the Palm
Plantation, and he said, yes sir, then he asked me a question I could not understand.
Instead of asking my driver to repeat himself, I just nodded and said yes. We drove on a
narrow blacktop road that cut a neat and narrow path between the sugar cane on both
sides. To my right, I could continue to see the tops of the volcanic mountains above the
sugar cane fields and sometimes a glimpse of villages, a group of small shanties is all,
maybe a church, people sitting beneath the shade of a tree with deep orange flowers. Saw
very few cars on the road, a few tractors pulling carts of freshly cut sugar cane, people
walking alongside the road, stopping to watch us pass. Arrived at the Plantation Inn after
a twelve minute drive, the black concierge dressed in a formal military style uniform
greeted me with what must have been the Queens English, took my bags and ushered me
inside. I paid the taxi driver his stated amount plus another ten percent yet he argued

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with me inarticulately all the way to the door as if I had cheated him. Reception area was
small but nicely furnished, large colorful batiks on the walls, some paintings in ornate
frames hung above polished wooden furniture that looked like antiques from old English
homes. My room was on the second floor, tall ceilings, large fan that spun a pleasant
breeze, wooden doors opened to a small veranda where you could peer across a busy
street and all the way to the harbor, the powdery fragrance of the flowering vines on the
veranda, a faint smell of sewage. I lay down and without realizing it fell asleep. At 6:42
pm I was awakened by a knock on the door. I opened it and the concierge notified me
that the doctor was ready to see me. I thanked him, closed the door. I took a shower, put
on some fresh clothes and took my notebook and tape recorder downstairs. The
receptionist spotted me and immediately stepped from behind her desk. With a gesture of
her hand she asked me to proceed into the outdoor dining area. Even before I stepped
into the quaint patio filled with tropical plants in between the tables set up with white
cloths, I saw him sitting in a chair at the far end of the courtyard. He appeared larger than
I imagined, a massive man collapsed into a tall wicker chair, his long legs stretched out
and crossed in front of him, his arms resting on a large stomach, his head tilted against
the back of his chair, an unlit pipe in his mouth. He was dressed in a grey jumpsuit, heavy
black boots, his grey-white beard and same colored hair like smoke around his ruddy
face. A chimera of Santa and Fidel, Whitman as railroad mechanic. As I approached him,
the receptionist darted in, leaned over the seemingly dozing man and in a quiet voice
said: Doctor, your guest is here. With that his eyes opened languidly and even more
slowly he rose to his feet, towering at least six and one half feet despite the stoop of old
age pressing him down. He looked at me with a smile that revealed the deep wrinkles

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throughout his face, and a twinkle in his watery blue eyes. He took my hand in his strong
but gentle grip and said, Well V, you made it to our little island paradise welcome.
Thanks, I said setting my book and tape recorder on the table then sitting down. I
brought this, I said pointing to the recorder, I hope that is okay. The faint odor of
lavender soap, the sweet dank smell of tobacco. Absolutely fine, he said with a wink. I
pushed the start button.

Ok, my name is V and

I began but the old man interrupts me in midsentence. Sorry, he said, to hear of the
rude welcome you received in customs today. How did you I began but he interrupted
again. They have adopted new procedures here as of late, he said. Nothing to do with 911. Drugs and arms are the reason for paranoia here, not terrorists. No one gets special
treatment anymore. I had asked them to give you special clearance, which is in fact what
they gave you. He laughed. Imagine if you had to go through the entire inspection they
had had planned for you. He looked up at the sky which was overcast. Yes, he says with
a laugh, it appears you lucked out young man. Mathilda was supposed to land here ahead
of your flight. Got held up near Barbados I guess. But dont worry, shell be here
shortly. This is your first time here, right? Well, if you havent been through a hurricane
on a remote Caribbean island you havent lived. See these shutters? Probably braced a
hundred storms. You can take some comfort in that, right? Last one I remember was
Barbara. Women are the worst it seems, huh? No fury hath! He laughs. Three days of
the most nerve-wracking wind, palms trees bending like dandelions, five or six days of

Attrition Page 5
relentless rain, water everywhere, streets became rivers where you boated to the shop
which they had moved to the second story. You shouted up to the second floor balcony
for some tobacco or a cheese sandwich, they tossed it down to you, you tossed them back
a few bucks inside a tin can. But it was the wind that tortured you. Hour after hour.
Couldnt sleep, couldnt read, couldnt fuck even. After three days of that we were all
ready to be committed. When we were finally able to come out, I opened this shutter
here and poked my head out. Must have been three feet of water flooding the streets.
But guess what the first thing I saw was? This is no shit. Making its way up the street,
half walking, half swimming, an elephant! Thats right a fucking elephant! Her trunk up
in the air, her legs pushing against the current, it was amazing. He laughs. Apparently a
circus had been passing on a ship when it had to pull into harbor here to wait out the
storm. When the boat began pitching too much, they decided to let the elephant they
only had one onto shore. I guess it escaped. And they never did find it. Apparently I
was one of the last to even see it. Eventually it made its way to the mountains. Some
villagers say they still hear it trumpeting at night. Some people say it got swept out to sea
and drowned. All I know about elephants is that you dont give them acid. He laughed.
An elephant on a bad trip is not something you ever want to see.

He looked at me and touched his nose

then looked away, wet his finger with his tongue and picked up some bits of tobacco from
the table with that same finger. Not nervous, bored. Age spots on his temples and cheeks.

Attrition Page 6
His pale blue eyes nearly transparent. As you know, I am an associate of Dr. Ping from
the University of C. Yes, I am indeed aware of that, he said. Of course. And I have invited
myself here to ask you some questions about your research, your life and your thoughts, I
guess, on what you He interrupted me yet again, this time with a gesture using the pipe
in his hand, waving it towards me, as if to show me that only he had the right to speak.
But before we begin with these questions, he said, maybe I can help set the tone here for
your interview, you see I think I may know why you are here, why you traveled all the
way down here to meet me, I had had some conversations not too long ago with Ping, and
well, there was something to those conversations that you should probably know about.
Long pause, then he laughs. I knew he would eventually get himself out of that rat race
he was in, I told him years ago he would probably end up moving to a ranch somewhere
in the middle of nowhere, some place where he can tinker and dig and do what he does
all day long with no one but a few neighbors to bother him.

He changes his posture

from sitting back in his chair to sitting upright, his back a little ways from the back of the
chair, his elbows on his knees, his attention on the pipe he is cleaning with a sliver of
bamboo while he talks. He does not look often at me, but when he does he smiles, his
cheeks rising, his eyes shining, his fingernails are dirty and need to be cut, his beard
ragged and flecked with tobacco and ash. Dr. Ping seemed content, I commented. Yes, I
agree, and so, V, I thought it might help our conversation if I told you a little bit about
what I know about you, you see, I have been a colleague of Ping for a long time, decades

Attrition Page 7
in fact, and your name came up more than once or twice in my discussions with Ping,
especially in this last conversation. He had a strong admiration for you, you werent the
brightest student of his, I dont think he had the highest expectations for you or what you
would become, but he liked you, trusted you, and that went a long way with him. He told
me how surprised he was to see you that last time. He appeared like the ghost of a son I
had killed long ago, I think Ping said to me.

There is a long silence

Can you tell me a little about your early relationship with Dr. Ping? I will V. But let me
finish my thoughts here. I am getting old V and sometimes if I dont finish immediately
what I began it will be gone forever. Where do those thoughts go that we dont finish I
wonder? I cant help but think they are still out there, if only we could live long enough
to finish something, anything. Used to be it would bug the fuck out of me to forget
something. But now, well. And so see now I have accomplished what I feared, I have
forgotten what I wanted to say. Damn! Perhaps it will come back.

Perhaps we can talk about your past with Dr.

Ping?

Yes, yes of course. I met Ping here of all places, what forty, maybe fifty years ago? Not
even sure anymore. I had been working with primates, African greens, over in Africa, we

Attrition Page 8
had set up a research center in what is now Zimbabwe and ran into some problems when
a military coup decided they could make better use of our gear and equipment. It was
then I had heard of some guy who was working with the same African monkeys here on
the islands. So I tracked the guy down, found him wandering the rainforests, found him
in fact up on Mt Liamuiga over there behind us, now called Mt. Misery after I started
referring to it as the most miserable place on the island. Beautiful, absolutely beautiful
but downright fucking miserable all the same. He laughed. I found Ping halfway up that
mountain, lying down in a ravine, covered with mud and bug bites, this slightly crazed
look in his eyes. I said, you must be Dr. Ping, I presume? Shh! He said, were just about
to discover a breakthrough in new behavior of the vervet, Ping said with all seriousness.
Well, what behavior is that, I asked him, looking around seeing nothing but ferns and
vines and patches of darkness. Its the blueballed doublethrust fuck-you-asshole-I-amking alphamale display, he said, or some nonsense like that. Well, it took me a while but I
finally got that crazy bastard down off the hill. Anyway, after a few shots of rum and
some goat water, I convinced Ping life could be better and together we built a research
center on one of the old sugar cane plantations and the rest, well, is history, I guess you
could say. You were a student of Pings, you actually lived with him for some time didnt
you? So you know Ping as well as anyone, perhaps as well as me. Ping was a unique
man, V. You know that. He was always kind of a hero to me, to have accomplished what
he did with what he had to work with. It bothers me to this day what happened to him,
how he was treated by the fucking establishment, pardon my French. That we didnt see
eye to eye on many things was not really a problem for us, in fact without that tension so
to speak I am not sure what our relationship would have consisted of. In some ways,

Attrition Page 9
Ping did not really give a fuck and he had little time for nonsense. Yet he couldnt stop
writing and publishing. He would write about anything and everything. I remember once,
when he was invited to participate in a study on obesity and brain function, he came back
and told me that there was nothing of any value to write about. But a few weeks later,
Ping came out with an article anyway, entitled Howmigonna Syndrome, which apparently
came from one of the obese patients complaining to him, Howmigonna get up this
morning? He laughed loud and long. We were both trained as psychiatrists, yet only
Ping saw patients in his practice. We did however share the attitude that psychiatric
analysis by no means leads to a smoother adaptation to lifes situations. I suspect, and I
still think it could be proven, that insight is the opposite of what we need, lets face it,
insight is sometimes intolerable and can lead to the actual detriment of the patient and I
would say in particular the psychiatrist himself. Some of this affected Ping, and I think
this was ultimately part of his problem, he was never able to completely avoid the pain
his patients brought to him. Ping was ultimately a weak man, but unique. Now Ping
wasnt weak like the others were weak, like the Rs and the Ps were weak, the Rs who
protected their little insignificant kingdoms, their puny research territories like some wild
animal protecting its nest, defending against anyone and anything that might intrude upon
its space, and doing so for years, decades even, I am never sure to this day how the Rs
survive or even make it in the first place, they are nothing but packrats of scientific
nonsense, hoarders of trivial ideas and miniscule theories that have no value whatsoever,
yet there they are, barricaded so to speak in their little university bungalows and trailers,
ready to attack anyone that even comes close, get too close and you would see that what
they were doing was complete and utter nonsense, yet there they were year after year and

Attrition Page 10
like I said decade after decade, still holed up in their little world, still cranking out useless
publication after useless publication, bitter, sour old fucks for the most part, without a
real idea or an opinion to contribute to society, yet society supported them all the same,
society was afraid to go near those little bunkers, afraid of what they had seen happen to
the others who came too close, and so the Rs are left alone and left to be, and the longer
they are left to be the more entrenched they become in their little burrows they create
where they can churn out nonsensical rubbish the likes of which no one will ever read let
alone understand how it came to be. No Ping was not like R in any way. Nor was Ping
like P, P was nothing but a parasite, never had an idea of his own no matter how bad,
simply flittered from one persons idea to another persons idea, sucking what he could
from anothers work, finding a small twist here, a little twist there to come up with
something just different enough to be included in some obscure symposium, some dead
end scientific journal, yet by virtue of his prolific nature, he was never upbraided for his
lack of real contribution, he was someone who was always invited to be a member of a
panel, yet he never had anything to say except something like: well, I think S said it best
-- and so never contributed in person just as he never contributed on paper, just as he
would never contribute to anything in this world, yet there he was, he and his team of
researchers nothing but a paper mill operation pumping out paper after quasi scientific
paper discussing nothing that had not been discussed before ad nauseum flitting from one
real thinker to another, whoever was the real thinker of the moment that is where P would
gravitate, didnt matter if that real thinker of the moment was someone who contradicted
the real thinker P had emulated the year before, all that mattered was that the real thinker
of the moment had some currency that P could borrow, and so he grabbed whatever coins

Attrition Page 11
fell and that is how he lived, no that is how he thrived for many many years. But even
the Ps and the Rs were acceptable compared to the Zs who were nothing but prostitutes
and that is putting it mildly to say the least, it was without exaggeration to say that the Zs
are the true scum of the scientific industry and that too is putting it mildly, because the
Zs would never even consider coming up with an idea or thought on their own, in fact
that is not their job, their job is not to think, it is to create the results for the company that
pays them, the Zs are nothing but whores, yet universities these days will build an entire
building for these whores, that is what the universities build, nothing but high tech
brothels for the worst kind of science! These guys are the ones who get the newest
facilities, the most support, they are the ones who attract the best students, it is disgusting
but that is how the world is, this is what science in America is all about, about pimps and
whores, each fucking each other as far as I am concerned, not even coming up with new
treatments or regimes, but simply creating science to support the industrial machine that
needs to be as profitable as possible, it is true, they dont seek new treatments, they take
old cold sore medicines and look for ways to justify using it as an antipsychotic, they take
a medicine from some obscure disease that will never make money and try to show that
medicine can also be used to treat arthritis or some other general malady so that they can
make tons of money. The Zs are nothing but whores and the companies they work for
nothing but pimps. Yet we as a society are okay with all that. No, Ping was nothing like
that, far from it, Ping was high high above the Zs, high high above the Rs and the Ps,
Ping had his own weaknesses, but nothing like the Rs, Ps and Zs who make up the vast
majority of scientists in this country.

Attrition Page 12

We are interrupted
this time by the waitress who asks us if we would like anything from the bar. He took a
deep breath, exhaled slowly as if annoyed by the distraction, set down his pipe, used that
free hand to point to me and asked if I would like anything. I asked for some water. He
reached into his hip pocket and pulled out a box of wooden matches. From his bib he
produced a soft package of tobacco, filled his pipe and then spent several minutes trying
to light it. There was a familiar, pungent smell to the tobacco. A wind has begun to swirl
around us, coming in through the open shutters, and at least three or four matches fail to
ignite.
You need patience to live in the third world, he laughed. If not, the little things
like bad matches will do you in. (A few grunts until he finally lights the pipe. The
smoke whirls about him then flies past me, ganja.) There! Reminds me of a time when
we were driving back one night from the other side of the island, we were in a old beat up
van, once of those German pieces of shit they brought over here a few decades ago.
Anyway, we are only about half way back, not a village or shanty within a mile, when the
engine sputters and dies. We had run out of gas. Of course the gas gauge doesnt work,
our driver is drunk, its a Sunday night so no one is out, all in all a perfect fuck up. And
its one of those pitch black nights where you couldnt see your hand in front of your face
so were stumbling around outside the van while this racket is going on, the driver
rummaging through some stuff in the back of the van. I am with my local buddy and I
am about to tell him we need to start walking, when suddenly this driver starts lighting

Attrition Page 13
matches over these containers he has pulled out of the back. He lights a match, holds it
over the mouth of the container, sets the container down, lights another match over
another container, and so on. I said to my friend, please tell me what the fuck is this guy
doing besides trying to kill himself? Him cant smell, my friend says mixing up his
pronouns as they do down here. He cant what, I am about to say when as he lights a
match over the next container a flame shoots out catching the ends of this guys hair on
fire for a brief moment. The driver just laughs and shakes the sparks from his head and
proceeds to pour the contents of the container into the gasoline tank of the van. Dat one
da Hammon, my friend said. Hammon or Hammond being the local name for moonshine
here, named after Lord Roy Hammond, stationed here by the British after the Second
World War and who had his agents try to crack down on the local moonshine practice,
with no success of course. So they named it after him. Thats poetic justice, huh?
Anyway, I cant strike a match without thinking about that drivers hair all lit up like
some coconut torch. He grunts. (Long pause) Ok, no, Ping was a good man, a
meticulous man in many ways. He was also a pessimistic man, took a very dark view of
the world, deep down he was pessimistic to the core, yet at the same time he was
strangely optimistic as well, pessimistic with an optimistic strain, his optimism more a
wish actually, more a faintly beating pulse of what he really wanted to feel rather than
what he actually felt. If any man could contain two contradictory qualities, that would
have been Ping, Ping had that ability, the pessimistic Ping existed quite nicely alongside
the optimistic Ping, the pessimistic Ping sometimes engaged as it were in a dialogue with
the optimistic Ping, the two of them bedfellows, Siamese twins in a way. But the biggest
thing that I saw, V, the biggest difference between Ping and me was that Ping, deep down,

Attrition Page 14
Ping truly believed the world was evil, that people were evil. Combating this evil was not
another side to the human condition called goodness, no all we had to combat evil within
us was our rationality, which for most people was a poorly developed faculty, and that
was being generous. In other words, they could not be trusted with the goals of science,
people couldnt, well in fact they couldnt be trusted with anything. Pings basic attitude
was that give anything to someone and they would fuck it up. So I think if you start
there, if you take that as the basic belief, the driving force behind all of Pings actions,
you will begin to see the patterns and understand the overall picture of things, at least as
far as Ping is concerned. He leans over and looks at me, the smoke from his pipe causing
his eyes to squint. And oh, by the way, he included himself in this, his classification of
mankind, oh yes, by all means, he believed he was as corrupt and incompetent as anyone.
That was part of his charm really, that he could never see himself as better than anyone
else. I, on the other hand, dont agree with this, that everyone is evil, but I believe this
core belief of Pings was so engrained in him, so much a part of his approach to
everything, that it never would have made any sense to argue it. Yet Ping was a pessimist
and an idealist at the same time, Ping could have these pessimistic views of humanity but
he still believed there was a better world, a utopia of some kind. For some people, trying
to maintain both of these perspectives, both of these attitudes would have been an
extraordinary perhaps unbearable strain, would have created undesirable effects, but in
Ping it was the opposite, bearing both and opposite attitudes was a reinforcing trait, with
both attitudes he was indeed more at peace than others, as if these two warring issues
made everything else a calm and approachable nirvana. But there were times, when one
of these polar attitudes would take over and he would be driven in one direction versus

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another, sometimes in a completely irrational fashion. I remember once, years ago, Ping
and I were down here together and someone right here at this hotel told us about a
mythical beach at the very end of the island. At the time there was no way to get there
but to walk over the mountain and then hike several miles down a dry, deserted peninsula
until you reached the southernmost tip where this purported oasis was situated. I doubted
such an Eden existed, I had been here for years and never heard of such a place, but Ping
was convinced we should go see for ourselves. (long pause) Now I had my own reason
for going on this trip. I had always dreamed of stocking the southern tip with monkeys
and doing a massive Calhoun rat experiment, providing them with unlimited food until
every space is filled and they became a city and began to rape and murder each other and
the mothers to commit infanticide, eating their babies. Then add to this some of
Delgados experiments, control certain ones with electronics and gadgets, make the
weakest one the only one who could open the food, and watch how he became the leader,
make the alpha male a criminal outlaw omega. That would have been a helluvan
experiment. In any case, we did take off for this beach, the next day in fact, we loaded up
with water bottles and started over the mountain, then down the peninsula, which was an
old lagoon that had dried up long ago, it was so dry and so arid it was in fact nothing
more than a large saltflat. One or two salt farmers were out there on the flats, nothing but
black stick figures, their bodies like tongues of black smoke wavering in distance through
the heat, these men lived their entire lives filling burlap bags with salt and carrying it
across this flat, selling the bags in town for maybe fifteen cents a bag, if that. He laughs.
Anyway, Ping had earlier lost his sunglasses along the trail and so after walking across
this saltflat for more than an hour, which was as white as snow and as fucking brilliant as

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a field of diamonds, well after about an hour, Ping goes blind from all the sun and the
reflection. He insists on continuing for some god forsaken reason. So I tied a wet
bandana around his eyes and then wrapped a rope around his waist which I then attached
to my waist and so we crossed that flat like that and made our way to the end of the
island. When we got there, Ping took off his bandana and literally screamed, the pain
was so great, yet he was begging me to tell him what I saw. What I saw was a jagged
beach of black rocks covered with piles of bird dung. Every step you took launched a
cloud of flies into your face and the water was a murky brown color like some sewage
leak that drifted far out into the ocean. Its absolutely unique, I told Ping, there is not
another beach like this in the whole Caribbean. I could see a smile on Pings pathetic
looking face, which was burned red, swollen like he had been in a fist fight, the flies
sucking at the ooze from his cracked lips and running blisters. With that, he untied the
rope and made a dash for the water. Before I could stop him he tripped on a rock and fell
ass first, thank god, onto a nest of sea urchins. Well, you would have thought that was all
that could have happened to the poor boy, but after I had pulled him out of the water and
removed to the best I could a few hundred spines from his ass, Ping crawled into the
shade of a tree and lay there moaning. Well, it turns out that the tree he chose to rest
under was a tree called the Manchinele Tree, one that I, I am afraid to say, was not
familiar with being as it was found only on this forbidden tip of the island. Well the story
of the Manchinele tree I later learned is that a British boat capsized off the coast of the
island long ago and the sailors had to swim to shore. When they got here they were
exhausted and sunburned and crawled under these trees to rest. A rain came and worked
its way through the trees leaves which are some of the most poisonous on earth and

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dripped on the sleeping men. Needless to say they never awoke. This story had
something to do with the fact that no one came here for more than a century. Fortunately
for Ping, it didnt rain during his rest under the Manchinele tree but the leaves on the
ground were still potent enough to create huge welts on his arms, legs and neck, which
even before we got back to the main part of the island had opened like third degree burns
and so Ping, on his quest to see the most beautiful beach in the world is blind, barely able
to walk because of the urchin spines in his ass and is covered with these oozing, open
wounds. He looks like hell, Ingersott laughs, like bloody hell. Anyway, he laughs again,
what was the point of this story? Yes, right. After we got back, I said to Ping, you know
Ping, we may not have gone in the right direction, after you were blinded on the saltflats I
simply headed for the closest point for shade, not in any direction that was given to us.
Indeed, the fact is, he went back a few years later, still couldnt find it, but still Ping
talked for years after that about how he was going to make this place his own, and vanish
there, away from everyone.

Was this search for utopia

in his science as well? I asked. Well, (he said, puffing on the pipe) it is a poor example
of what I wanted to tell you, but a good story nonetheless, dont you think? You are right,
Ping believes, truly believes there is a better world out there, but he doubts we have the
ability to find it. And so, Ping would say, we are stuck with what we have. The fact is, I
think he tried one too many times to find that beautiful beach in his life and was
disappointed every time. So eventually he gave up. Look, V, people are not inherently

Attrition Page 18
evil, I dont believe that and I dont think there is any evidence to support that. Now are
people with money evil? Are people with too much power evil? Are people on drugs evil?
Those are more interesting questions. But people all by themselves, no. I have traveled
everywhere, V, met people in all sorts of situations. What is interesting to me is that the
more distant a person or culture is from our own, the better those people seem to be. We
seem to have fewer problems with the poor people in cities in India than we do with rich
neighbor kids in suburban USA. We have less problems with the blacks here, who are
living and sleeping on dirt, than we do with the blacks at the universities. I am not saying
that the kids in suburban US or at the universities are evil. No, what I am saying is that
our experiences with the poor people in India and the blacks here tell me that it is not
people that are evil, it is something else. Let me give you an example. The world here
on this island is changing, V, I am not going to say it is not changing for the better as
people here begin to work in the hotels and casinos instead of slaving away in the cane
fields, I am not going to say that people here are not better off with nicer clothes, canned
foods instead of what you get at the market, with cable TV which is quickly making its
way around the island. Of course the people are better off, they have more money, their
kids can leave and go to universities in England, they can learn about the rest of world
through TV. Those are all good things. The people are better off, but I am not sure this
makes people better. Years ago I had a friend here, a young kid named Pess. Pess was a
simple village kid, god fearing, polite, respectful, hard working, muscles like a prize
fighter. One day his younger brother is killed by a tractor, the tractor had run over Pesss
little brother and left him to die in the ditch by the road. The driver of the tractor later
admitted that he knew he hit Pesss brother but did not stop, didnt know if Pesss brother

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was dead or alive, he was too afraid he said, well it also turns our that this tractor driver
also had his eyes on this dead kids girlfriend. I took Pess to the morgue to see the body
of his brother. That was a terrible scene. Couldnt even recognize the boy, he was so
damaged he didnt even look human. I asked Pess, hey you okay? Pess turned to me,
looked me straight in the eye and said, Sure Im okay, Doctor. I am fine. Pess could have
filed murder charges against the driver of that tractor, instead he went to the drivers
house and asked the man to come outside. The entire village began to gather around the
two boys. Pess looked at the driver who was standing there with a machete in one hand,
his other hand in a fist. Pess reached out and the driver raised the machete in the air, but
before he could bring it down Pess had put his arms around the boy in an embrace, telling
the boy, I am sorry, I am sorry. While the machete was still in the air, the boy began to
cry, he began to sob, the machete fell and Pess stepped back. Pess just turned around and
left. I saw all of this with my own eyes, V. And what I saw, I truly believe was the moral
fiber of this community back then. This was before the new jobs, before the casinos,
before the cable TV, before the western music. So now, you would expect to see such a
matter confronted with knives, guns, perhaps something even worse. That V is the moral
fiber today. I truly think, V, the people are the same, but something else has changed.
Ping would believe that evil is in everyone, just waiting to come out, just a matter of
circumstance, of time. He would say we are inherently corrupt. I dont agree. This
distrust Ping had in all people, including me and including himself, led him to seek a way
to classify truth that did not depend on any one of us, or on any of us at all. His belief
that there was any truth out there to begin with was based, I think, on his assumption that
data would lead to truth. Yet there are abundant examples where the same data leads two

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people to two different conclusions, two different actions. And so Ping set out to find a
way to collect, categorize and analyze data in a way that avoided the corruption man
brings to everything. And he believed he found it. It was not just the data itself. Truth
was to be found in a relationship of not one to one but one to many. In other words, an
apple can be green or an apple can be red, but both are apples. So to begin defining an
apple you had to create a cluster of attributes, red, green, round, large, seeds on the
inside, hang from a tree, soft, sweet, sour. If a thing has enough of these attributes then it
is an apple, but no two apples need to have all the same attributes, just enough attributes
taken from a pool of attributes that apply to all apples. Data was data by virtue of a brain
that considered it to be data. A thing was true by virtue of a brain that had the ability to
cluster data, sort through those clusters and arrive at a determination based on its inner
sorting process. He grunted. I think, personally, and I have told Ping this on several
occasions, that he was confusing two things. Striving for knowledge is much different
than striving for truth. Striving for knowledge is a practical activity that we do as a
people, as a culture, a nation, a community. What we know today is not what we knew
yesterday and we are actually perfectly comfortable with the idea that it will be different
tomorrow. Knowledge evolves, changes, is never static, it depends on our tools, our
attitudes and most importantly our needs, what do we need to know? Do we need to
know what chemicals make up Mercury? Do we need to know what causes breast
cancer? Do we need to know if the magnetic poles are moving? Do we need to know if a
bomb will kill enough people? Gaining knowledge is a messy, dirty activity that more
often than not leads to results we regret. Striving for truth on the other hand, is a
completely different activity. I am not even sure it is a real activity at all. Some people

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will spend their lives trying to figure out who is the greatest baseball player of all time,
but is that an activity? Ping thought, believed that every person was evil and that if you
give mankind the perfect tools in science he will fuck up the world. Pings answer was to
give him tools that were pragmatic and would work. The problem with this attitude is
kind of simple: It doesnt seem to be true. How many truly evil people do you know?
How many people do you know who have killed someone, raped someone, robbed a
bank? How many people do you know throw rocks at cars on the freeway, how many
people do you know take crack, fuck prostitutes, sell their kids into slavery? Lets look at
it this way, how many times have you been at a bank and been interrupted by a robbery,
how many times have you seen someone gunned down in the street? Forget the extreme
examples, lets pick some smaller examples, how many people do you see driving outside
of the lines on the road? How many people push in front of you at a line at the grocery
store? How many times has your wallet been stolen? How many times have you seen
something, anything you would call evil? The answer is probably once or twice, more
than likely it is never. So with that, how in the world can you say all people are inherently
evil? Seems to me we are a pretty obedient group, a pretty boring group. I personally
would like to see a little more going on, a few more detractors to the system, a smattering
more problems. That to me would seem to a sign of a healthier society.

Talking about you for a moment

You have been living here in a kind of exile now for several years. Why is that? Why
not? Why live anywhere else? Exile huh? Is that what this is? I grew up in East Texas,

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my mother was a widow and during the Depression she worked for the Farm Security
Administration, handing out loans to poor rural blacks. I think because of that, I feel
completely at home here with these people. And how can you not? They are extremely
polite, sure you got some of the young kids putting on a faddish, emulative
Rastafarianism, but this is basically an old-time colonial scene, right out of Mr. Pickwick.
And then, I also grew tired of the fucking politics at the universities. If it wasnt Tim at
H University handing out LSD to everyone like gumdrops, it was the hippie human rights
squads as I call them on the west coast, thinking I was trying to do away with the Che
Guevaras of the world. And I knew Chanco, as he sometimes liked to be called, at the
General Hospital in Mexico and later in Cuba, he was originally a physician you know,
not really the nicest guy. These freaks in Californian thought I was saying there was no
legitimate role for social justice because anger and violence were biological in nature not
psychological. But what I was saying was that each of us has a well-oiled mechanism
that is underlying our anger, and whatever triggers it is accompanied by specific,
measurable changes in brain function. But thats another story. Fact is, I wouldnt want
to be anywhere else.

You seem to have a mixed reputation

Many see you as a brilliant thinker. Others claim you are just a sloppy scientist who is
opportunistic. Which of these do you think you are? Sure, he laughed. First of all, I
guess I always considered myself a doctor and a humanitarian first, a researcher second.
Most researchers, I believe, are looking for a piece to a puzzle, what could seem like a

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very small, insignificant piece to the puzzle, but you add those pieces together and you
can get something very large and exciting. For some reason, I never had the aptitude or
the patience I should say for that game. I always ran straight for the bigger picture, I
wanted to cure things, not understand them. I often worked on what you and others might
call great leaps of faith, and these are things that most scientists do not condone. But
again, I was looking to bring about change, to bring about results and there were some
very human problems that needed results more than they needed rigorous science. A lot
of this started when I left clinical psychiatry, which couldnt cure a headache, and moved
to neurology where a very exciting world was opening up to all of us. We were
beginning to see that there were indeed very real, organic correlations between a persons
brain function and his behavior. Epileptic seizures could lead to violence for example. I
began to wonder if non-epileptics with histories of impulsive violence could in fact be
victims of other, unknown brain disorders. At one point I had over one hundred selfreferred violence patients, thirty five were murderers, and we are not talking about small
time, getting-a-little-irritable folk. One federal prisoner who came to me was too
embarrassed to tell me what he had done. He was a little guy, looked like Peter Lorre, I
read his file and discovered he had eviscerated two little girls, ages six and seven,
masturbated on their entrails and then tried to burn down a cathedral to conceal the
evidence. He was genuinely relieved to be locked up so he couldnt hurt anyone else. I
eventually discovered that this man had extraordinary levels of activity in his temporal
lobes, much like you would see in an epileptic. When he died we were able to autopsy his
brain and lo and behold he had lesions in the area of the amygdala, think of it like having
a festering blister on your foot that never goes away, you continue to walk and it flares up

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and you go berserk with pain. His behavior was out of his control, it was the result of a
brain malfunction. I get excited V when I think I am getting close to discovering
something, of finding something out, revealing something for the very first time. I admit
that excitement can lead to sloppy science, terrible experiments. Precision is good, but so
is passion V. You can have all the precision in the world, or seek the most precision
possible, but you may never do anything more than calibrate your instruments. One was
where I was looking for a change in the substantia nigra of the brain in a monkey so I
could prove that dopamine producing cells were indeed developing differently than other
cells. I was sure this was the case, dont remember why any more, but after hacking
through 50 monkey brains and finding nothing to support this, unlike another scientist
who would have quit, I hacked through another fifty fucking brains but this time
removing the brain before the monkey died. Voila! I found what I knew was right. It was
the brain death that caused the cell structures I was looking for to vanish. But many said
I had not thought through his procedure carefully enough, and had I thought it through, I
would have needed maybe 6 or at the most 9 monkeys to prove my point, not fifty. They
circulated a picture of me standing like a butcher next to a pile of dead monkeys higher
than my eyeballs, each corpse decapitated, those little hands stretching out as someone
commented:

as if begging for forgiveness

I remember that photo, why I had it taken I dont know, but that is what I mean, V, I knew
the answer was there. Sure I killed a mountain of moneys, but I did it all in a few days. I

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could have been precise and killed five moneys here, five monkeys there, but would I
have found my answer and would I have killed fewer monkeys in the end? Who can say?
But I doubt it. Besides I am an admitted specieist, V, I will do what needs to be done to
help our species. In fact, Dr. K took my results and came up with a chemical treatment
for Parkinsons. I was never named in his work, never got any credit for it, but it was I
who discovered what he needed. In fact, it was I who called Dr. K and told him of my
results, In fact, I told him that night, I remember, of what I thought he should look for in
a treatment for Parkinsons, a dopamine enhancer is what I told him would work and that
is exactly what he did. There was another the time when I thought I found a chemical in
rabbits blood after they were given LSD. Based on this, a hunch really, I put patients
with schizophrenia on dialysis, cleaning their blood of what I believed were by-products
of some similar naturally occurring chemicals, which we had detected and had good
reason to suspect were triggering these episodes. The treatments had remarkable results.
Nearly all the patients were cured of their hallucinations and other symptoms within a
few months. We had a feature in Time magazine reporting our breakthrough. Now
people were lining up for treatment. There were not enough available dialysis machines
in the US to treat everyone. But before we could get started, a few patients had a set
back, actually they died but people on dialysis sometimes die. The treatments were
stopped and all the patients resumed their hallucinations and were all taken back to the
wards. Because a few people had died I was eventually called a criminal, but actually
since none of the universities would pay for this study and insurance was out of the
question, all the families had paid for their sons or daughter to be on these treatments and
those treatments were expensive. Most of these families were now broke. I was sued by

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them, I was sued by the hospital. But I was right, V. At the time I was right. You were
around the laboratory a lot. I saw you there many times when I came to visit with Ping.
You had what I called the initiates zeal. It was in your eyes, in the way you went about
your work, the great concentration you put into every activity, the care and carefulness
that went into all you did. I watched you for some time, you were an impressive student.
In fact, Ping had a bumper crop of students back then and one of the reasons they were so
good was because of you V. You werent the academic star, but you set the standard for
passion for your work. So you know what I am talking about. Every other student knew it
was not a matter of how good their grades were, it was how did they match up to V. In
some ways, Pings success during this time had more to do with you than anything else, I
believe. Without you he would not have accomplished what he did, he would not have
had the quality of players on his team that he did. He would not have had the confidence
to go as far as he did. If you could ask him today, what do you credit for your success
Ping? I am almost certain he would say it had been you. You brought that initiates zeal
and from that developed a real passion for your work. And now, years later, I would bet
you would look back upon those days with some difficulty, wouldnt you? Some
difficulty in the sense of: Why did I do that? What did I believe? Was I really indeed
thinking about what I was doing? The fact of the matter was V, you werent thinking.
You were scripting and doing. What we all do when we are too afraid of what knowledge
is really about. We follow a script and then we act according to that script. Well, the
world is more complicated than that I am afraid, and I would guess that you, V, have
discovered that in your own way, on your own time. Like the rest of us, you have had to
face that what you believed in and what you thought you knew were little more than

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hogwash, bullshit, crap, nothing but shit V! And that your life was nothing but more of
the same. So what do you do? When faced with the fact that your life is shit, what do
you do? You go on to the next thing V. You go right along. And as you go along you sit
back and laugh at all the people who believe in their failures and worthlessness. You
were spared fortunately, V. You lived in Pings camp, where no one was harmed, but no
one was ever really helped. No one is committed to the real process of science V. It is
like war. We cant complain about war because it kills people, in fact war is supposed to
kill people, I mean isnt that the very purpose of war, the definition of war? And when we
win a war it is always across the litter of ruined cities and dead children that we wave our
hands and declare we have progressed. Science is the same. People, things, animals,
monkeys will die in this war for knowledge. That is just the fact of the matter. Yet we
are too stupid as a race of people to admit this and get on with it. No, we cherry pick the
ones who commit these acts and we hang them, we banish them, we force them into
retirement. It is all hypocritical V. Since I have been here, V, youd be amazed at what I
have done. Now, I dont have the tools or instruments I had at G or H Universities, that
much is for sure, but I have cooperation. From the government, from the families, even
from the patients themselves. They all seem to understand the process so much better
than we do. This here is paradise V. To be banished here was probably the best thing that
could have happened to me. Thats right. I could not have asked for a better place to
finish my work.
Some people have gone further and accused you of doing some pretty terrible
things, some have suggested you should be charged for crimes against humanity for some

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of the things you have done. How, in light of what you have said about people being evil,
do you respond to this? Ah yes. Sure.

People have accused me of being a racist

for removing a part of the brain where abnormal neuronal behavior was leading to violent
outbursts in these people. These were black people? (long pause) These were black
people, he answered. They were the people who had been admitted to the psych unit for
violent behavior. I did not admit them. I was asked to fix a problem, not diagnose the
problem. The problem was you had kids who were ruining their lives, ruining the lives of
their families, ruining the lives of their victims, because of their violent behavior. This
was all documented. Violence is not like intelligence. There are often little grounds for
interpretation of acts of violence versus acts of intelligence. I was faced with the
problem: What do you do for these kids and all the people they will affect with their
behavior? (long pause) The amygdala is an ancient part of the brain, not known for its
role in intelligence, creativity, higher functions. It is part of the limbic system, the part of
our brain that we share with lizards and birds, the part that was developed to respond to
basic things like threats on our life. We found spikes in the neuronal activity in the
temporal lobes of these kids. How do you cure that if there was indeed a link to their
violent behavior? Was it caused by some drugs they took? By being beat up by a parent?
By living in poverty? No one had these answers back then, no one had a way of even
intelligently asking these questions back then. Yet, there I stood, being asked to provide a
solution. The fact is, the operations worked. Most of these kids never committed an act

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of violence again. Compared with the other kids who were put on drugs, given shock
therapy, given insulin treatments worse yet, the kids who were locked up in solitary
confinement for Gods sake the amygdalectomies were a resounding success. Later
some kids developed epilepsy, probably due to a piece of lint, maybe the cotton that was
placed inside the skull to take up the space where we had removed the tissue, perhaps due
to the lack of precision we had back then in removing tissue compared to now (long
pause) but then was not now. The question is: what was more humane to keep these
kids locked up like animals or to treat them and let them go home? Because that was
their choice back then to be locked up like wild animals, like criminals. Or to be treated
and let back into society. I never considered what I did to be a cure. A cure fixes
something. I am not sure what I fixed if anything. But I stopped something. And I do
think it helped. I do think it made things better, it made things better for the individual as
well as for the community. It made things better for all of us. And we learned something
from it. For Christs sake we each take on guilt for things we do as a society. And what
should cause more guilt? Locking up a kid in the prime of his youth so that he rots
mentally and physically, or doing something that allows him a chance to live in some
better way? Why did the guilt get turned around and put upon the procedure, upon me,
upon some racist ogre who was cutting up the brains of black men? Those accusations,
those attitudes happened because of hindsight, it happened because knowledge follows a
path, and that path does not often allow the past to be remembered except as a barbarian
past. That is how we propel ourselves, that is how we claim progress, that is how we
believe we can measure ourselves, by comparing ourselves to the barbarians of the past.
As a scientist and a medical researcher, my job was to kill, it was to destroy, only by

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killing and destroying would we even get anywhere, would we see any progress in any
sense, you learn as you grow older that it is not what you have accumulated that matters.
As a scientist it was also my job to identify the real problems of the world, the real
problems that needed to be solved, I could have studied ionic channels in flatworms, but
the real problem in the world is not flatworms. I could have dedicated my life to the
organization structure of corporate systems, but the real challenge to life is not the
corporate systems. There is one and only one problem that underlies all of mankinds
problems, V, it is not sex, it is not greed, it is not hunger, it is not poverty, it is violence.
If a characteristic exists in another animal, we can probably cure it. But violence is a
human trait, only humans develop a culture, a society around violence, only humans treat
the world with a purely violent intent, only humans are miscreant V, no other animal is
miscreant, no other animal is as vicious to his own and others as the human is, no other
species creates and proudly showcases a culture based on violence. We are a society of
hatred and rage, if we look back and say anything about this pathetic period in human
history, we will undoubtedly call this period we are in the period of hatred and rage
against itself, for that is what it is, we will discover that we did more harm to ourselves in
this era of human life than in any other era of human life, and we did this harm to
ourselves in more ways that we ever managed to harm ourselves in any other era of
human life, and we did it longer, we did it with more ferocity and we did it with less
regret, that is the troubling thing, V, that for me is and was the turning point in our
development, as long as we had regret we had a hold of something that could potentially
lead us back to a better way, as long as we had regret we had a fiber somewhere in our
body that was connected to the hope that we would change, but the regret is gone now,

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we take joy in violence in ways we never displayed as a species, we are energized by
vengeance even when we have no enemy to debilitate, we seek confrontation, we find joy
in imagining the obliteration of others, our natural inclinations are to kill instead of
asking someone to please change lanes or lower her voice during a movie, our first
thought is to destroy and annihilate when someone cuts us off on the road or takes our
favorite seat in a restaurant. Violence and destruction is what we are all about, that is
what human life is all about, not creation, not progress, not advancement, but wanton
violence, I saw it as a human affliction, as an affliction genuinely and uniquely human,
and so I took this as my battle, this basis to humanity for so long, I made it my lifes
mission to understand violence, to uncover its roots, to find out where it lodges, where it
originates from, how it grows, how it comes to be, and the more I looked around my
world, the more convinced I was that I was right, riots, murders, police beatings, rapes,
gang fights, drug wars, student clashes, wife beatings, at first I thought this was a product
of today, but that is far too easy of an answer V, this violence and destruction has been
with us for centuries, it is not episodic, it is a constant, and so with that, as a scientist, I
had to hypothesize that this core to our being was not a social issue, was not a
psychological one, it had to be organic, and as the brain is the one organ through which
all behavior must pass, it had to be a problem with the brain, there had to be something
wrong, some biological, neuronal, chemical issue that was at the base of this. I was not
alone, V, I had plenty of support, I had legions of people ready to march with me. This
could actually change mankind, this could in fact change the entire world, the entire
planet. These were the days of enlightenment, V, the likes of which we will never see
again, we had discovered that the brain was indeed a marvelous organ capable of so much

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more than we had ever imagined, at the same time, capable of so much misery and strife.
No other problem, if eradicated, could do more, change more, we were on the verge of
utopia, V, we would not only help individuals, we would change society, we would
change humanity, we could correct what genetics had fucked up, we would reverse mans
decline as an unfit species heading towards the extinction list and bring him to the top,
we would change everything V, and we thought we had the means finally to do it. We
knew it was the brain, it had to be the brain, it had to be what had changed in the brain
from animal to man, from primate to man, something in that transition had changed,
something had gone wrong, that is where the problem lay. The wiring had gone wrong,
something was out of whack between the thalamus and the limbic system, between the
temporal lobes and the frontal lobes, who the fuck knew, but the problem was still that
obvious, and of course, I knew the solution, I just needed the means. I needed people, I
needed subjects, I needed brains to work on. Animal brains would do no good, they were
not afflicted with this malady. I needed human brains, human subjects. I had the desire, I
had the commitment. I wanted nothing more than to stop it, to cure it, to destroy it
myself, I was on a mission to destroy violence, and I chose the most violent means to do
that, I chose knives and needles, poisons and electricity, I chose to cut it out, to hack it
away, to ablate it, lacerate it and aspirate it, to plunge and poke, to tear and yank and
scoop it away, I chose to zap it, to electrocute it to poison it to dehydrate it shred it
obliterate it. I attacked violence with as much of my own violence as I could muster, we
performed amygdalectomies, lobectomies, topectomies, gyrectomies, cingulotomies,
limbic leucotomies, anterior capsulotomies, we used paper knives, ice picks, rotating
cutters, nasal septum elevators, knives with protractors, gamma rays, we tried

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thermocoagulation, radioactive implantation, ultrasonic irradiation, we used spatulas,
knitting needles, coathangers, letter openers, bandsaws, icecream scoops, I was relentless
V, I was sure that I could succeed, that I could find it and grab it and tear it out of its
place, strangle it and stop it, obliterate it to pieces. I was insane, V, utterly insane with
this passion and desire to destroy violence. Were we wrong? Of course. (he laughs) We
are always wrong. Did we fail? Absolutely, we will always fail. Did we have a choice?
Not really. We did what we had to do. Am I proud of all this? To be honest, I dont even
try to think about it anymore.
You were thought to be working with the CIA for some time on mind control
experiments, and that some of your studies involved giving LSD to children.

Did this really happen?

Again, history is a context that needs to worked into these accusations. Never in the
history of science have children have been spared from scientific research, in fact, we
probably do more research related to children than to adults, why? Well the reason is
obvious. We have a prejudice that adults with problems probably cant be cured, their
brains have hardened, like old dogs, whereas children, because they have elasticity to
their brains just as they have elasticity in their cartilage, they can be cured and spared a
life of misery. Acid was not always the dirty word it is now. Amphetamine, cocaine,
heroine-- there are a host of drugs that were thought to be cures, were thought to be
therapeutics, were given like aspirin, as cough medicine to kids. For a time they were
cures, miracle drugs, now we demonize those drugs. LSD was a different drug, it held in

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some ways even greater promise, it seemed to open up our investigation into how the
mind itself worked. A bad trip was not all that different looking than a schizophrenic
episode. Schizophrenia probably begins in childhood, so naturally it seemed wise to
begin looking for the mechanisms of the disorder in the young brain. Looking at an adult
with schizophrenia was kind of like looking at a healed scar and trying to understand how
to fix the wound. A childs brain can withstand an incredible amount of trauma or
damage, it has the ability to recircuit itself, to rebuild. But again, this is not something
you can study, we dont know a goddamn thing about neural circuitry, but does that mean
we should stop searching for a cure? But there is another side to this, a side that no one is
really willing to accept. Perhaps it is a fact that some kind of mind control is a natural
part of life, a part of the socialization process, indeed there seems to be some basis to this,
the biology of conversion, of unlearning, of what happens in the brain when someone is
treated to mind control, the mechanisms are all the same, suggesting that this is a process
that is necessary for us to be social beings, for each of us to act and behave and contribute
properly to society, to our group. And where does this process begin, but with the child,
and so it is natural to think that in the child you would find these mechanisms for
conversion to be the most receptive, to be the most active. It is a biological necessity. It
is the basis behind the family unit, being a member of the basketball team, fighting for
your country, being willing to die to save your family. The beauty of the young brain is
its ability to rebound, to take on abuse and come out if it okay. Think of all those
drunken reveries you had. Well, the older you get the harder it is to rebound, perhaps at
some point we dont rebound at all, just slide a little further down each time. So you can
call it mind control if you like, but to me this is a basic and necessary process of the

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human brain, not the animal brain, the human brain, one that needs and should be studied
if we want to know anything at all about ourselves.

What about the CIA?

What about the CIA? Did you work for the CIA? He paused. What about the CIA? Do
you ever feel sorry that you may have killed someone unnecessarily? I am a doctor, V, not
a philosopher. (long pause) A doctor kills someone unnecessarily, I guess, if he operates
when he is too tired, drunk, or when he knows he does not know what the fuck he is
doing. Every doctor will face that time in his life when he kills someone, by accident, by
negligence, by fate, who knows, but it will happen one day, and that doctor had better be
ready to step up to the next patient with what he learned from the death of the old patient.
Some deaths are necessary, if you want to think of it that way. In fact, learning of a
patients passing was sometimes as satisfying as reading the final lines of a good novel, if
you have been following that patient for years. Finally we can cut the sucker open and
see if we were right. Life is training for someone who needs to learn. No doctor knows
all the answers, no doctor is ever prepared for anything. A death may be needed to find a
new cure, define a new procedure, to think of the treatment of something in a new way.
A death may be whats needed to learn that you are too old to be a doctor. A philosopher
has the luxury to investigate knowledge in an archeological manner, sitting in a chair in a
study surrounded by books, a doctor has to cure people, today, he is surrounded by blood
and piss and shit and fuck knows what else, that is his world, that is the library from
which he makes his decisions. A philosopher can look at right or wrong in terms of
abstractions, a doctor is often faced with a decision based on what is the lesser evil, not

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what is the better good. Medicine is about curing suffering, taking away pain, as best you
can. It is not about doing what is ultimately right by the world. We cant look ahead, we
cant see beyond our limitations, beyond our own perspective. (long pause) I remember
once, I was operating on some guy who was suffering from debilitating epileptic fits, he
agreed to do the operation under local anesthetic, which meant we could ask him
questions while we felt around his brain. I remember we were in the final stages of the
operation and I cut too deep hit a small artery and by the time we had stopped it had
probably killed an area of his brain the size of an orange. I asked him, can you tell me
what you are feeling? He took a few seconds to answer and said with this absolutely
deadpan voice, a knife in my brain. He laughed. Did I harm this guy? Yea probably, but
did I harm others? Yes, undoubtedly. Did I do so willfully, not on your ass. Did I hurt
someone unnecessarily? Only in hindsight. But what doctor has the true benefit of
hindsight? We are up against the big unknown. Each time we reach into a persons brain
we have no idea what we are doing. We havent a fucking glimmer of an idea of what we
are doing. We are toying with the unknown. There is not a neuroscientist alive who
would tell you he really knows what he is doing. Brain scientists know we are in a crisis.
Despite all our knowledge about the brain and brain function, it feels like we know less
know than we did years ago. The brain is made up of neurons, well a hundred other
things as well, but lets start with neurons. How does a neuron work, do we know? Not
sure we do. The brain is a network of neurons. How do these networks work, do we
know? Not sure we know that either. Do we know how two neurons network with each
other? Three? A hundred. Last I heard there may be thousands of neurons in a network.
What does that network do? Do we know? We only know one thing right now. We know

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we will be wrong. If I reach into your brain and do something, I will be wrong. But I
will do it to help you. I will do it if I have to. If I have to, I will reach into your brain
and do what I have to do. Each time I was faced with a decision, it was a decision that
had to be made, not a decision that could be contemplated and massaged until I came up
with the perfect answer. Time is not on our side, V. Never was, never will be. We may
in fact know in our gut that the action we are about to take is going to be wrong later on,
but if it is the right action to take now, chances are we will take it. Mankind is a stupid
race, V, we are stupider than probably any other species because we dont have the ability
to properly use all the knowledge that we have. Despite having the knowledge, we dont
have the patience or the fortitude to make the right decisions, we lack the diligence to do
the right thing, we are filled with arrogance, with vengeance, with prejudice, we are
severely and I mean severely limited and flawed beings, V, you cant even compare us to
the monkey or even a dog, animals which rarely make the same kinds of mistakes that we
make, why? Because they live and dwell within their limitations. They arent even
tempted to act outside their parameters. They live as they need to live, they think and do
as they are wired to do. We, us fucking humans, it sometimes seems to me our brains are
nothing but tumors on top of our brainstems which grew out of control, like a cancer. So
here we are, trying to define ourselves according to an abnormal growth that makes us act
like idiots rather than as the set of functions that define what we really are. We are stupid
even further in that we always feel the need to justify what we did. We cant say, that was
what I needed to do at the time. No, we have to come up with a theory, a rationale, we
have to weave a myth so as to justify a bad action, to canonize a good one. (long pause)
My good friend, Dr. F, performed more than 3,000 lobotomies in one year! He did it

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with an ice pick. Stuck it behind the patients eyes, swished it back and forth like a
windshield wiper, pulled it out, wiped it off, and sent the patient on their way. He did
more than 20 in one day. I was there when they thought he was a hero. Today he is a
villain and lobotomies are akin to drilling cranial holes to let out the evil spirits. But it
wasnt always that way. The man who won the Nobel Prize during this time won it for his
work with lobotomies. Dr. F said he could not accept any credit for the genius of the
procedure, no, he was the fucking Henry Ford of lobotomies, not the Einstein of
lobotomies. He was only responsible for making lobotomies available to the common
man. The common man had no access to expensive surgeries, anesthesiologists, or any of
that. The average man could not have a lobotomy no matter how much he begged for it.
And they were begging for it, V, that was the point of Dr. Fs mission. They were
begging to have their brains cut, a life of sitting their looking at you navel was far better
than a life of battling demons all day and night. Dr. F was their savior. But I was also
there when they vilified him. They were unbelievably cruel, V, they drove the man into
such despair. Thorazine was the new miracle cure and suddenly Dr. F was a butcher.
Now that there was a drug to do the knifes work, he was the butcher. No matter that
Thorazine turned out to be just a chemical version of the butchers knife and a worse one
than Fs ice picks at that. He was remembered only for the lives others say he wasted, for
a road strewn with lobotomized patients that he left behind like human garbage during his
personal crusade to cure mental illness. He drove from clinic to clinic tirelessly, in this
old blue Oldsmobile sedan. I was there as a young man, I was with him, I drove in that
car with him, I listened to him literally die for years, I saw what he went through. Once
we drove down into Mexico to see some patients and his van broke down. He must have

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been near 70, about six feet tall and 140 pounds, a scarecrow of a man. But he wouldnt
stop. We somehow made it back to my home in Texas where we could get the car fixed,
the next day he went on without me. He spent the last years of his life hoping that what
he had done to those thousands of patients was in fact right, he visited each and everyone
of them, came back to them repeatedly, followed up to see if he could find something in
his patients that would somehow indicate him, in his car he carried these large individual
cards with a summary of the patients history and progress, with photographs fixed to the
back, filed in numerical order in loose-leaf volumes. In addition he had two files of 3x5
cards, one alphabetical with addresses, telephone numbers, addresses and phone numbers
of relatives, and physicians. The other was arranged geographically, with the patients
name and number, date and latest address. And he always had a box of some five hundred
Christmas cards from former patients. But eventually the hate, the ridicule, the
criminalization, it destroyed him. Doctors cannot face those consequences, V, we only
live in the moment, we act with what knowledge we have, we have to make decisions
based on what we know, what we hope to be true. That is the difference, V, we only hope
something is true. We dont know if it will be true, we are not even sure if it will be true,
I am not even sure we really care. As a doctor you learn not to take sides with the truth,
you learn to let come what may. But in the meantime, you cant wait, you need to act.
And when you act, you act with that hope as your sword. (long pause) Did I hurt people?

Was I evil?

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Should I have been imprisoned? Did I deserve what happened to me? It was inevitable
V. I dont blame anyone. No matter what I had done I would have been persecuted at
some point. I wont bother driving back that same road Dr. F drove seeking redemption.
It is not there. That is the plight of knowledge, it never lets a man gain either glory or
success. Anyone who fights on the side of knowledge will lose one day. We have only a
biased respect for history, we idolize the men who made fortunes, who waged wars, who
had power. But we dont respect the men and women who are responsible for defending
knowledge. Those people dont become heroes, they become fools. We look back at the
past and snigger at their ideas, their experiments, throwing balls off the Leaning Tower of
Pisa, planting and replanting pea plants. We think of them as children really, not capable
of having a profound conversation today. We have a sneaky suspicion that we would be
bored with them or drawn into a long conversation about astrology or something like that.
We look back at our own colleagues, just a few decades ago, sometimes just a few years
ago, and say to ourselves, what the fuck were they doing? We cant imagine what was in
their minds to think that that idea of theirs had any merit whatsoever? (long pause) We
are a society that believes in activity not progress, we are in fact a society that no longer
believes at all in progress, we have changed our view of history and changed our attitude
towards the future, whereas we used to see ourselves as continually pushing our world to
a better future, we had to paint all historical figures as backwards and inferior. Now that
we no longer believe in a better future, all we can muster is a hope for a world that is not
as bad as it could be, we now feel that the best we can accomplish is to not destroy the
world with our idiocy. Whereas we used to see the world in terms of utopias we now see
it as a inevitable wasteland we truly wish to avoid, and so as there are no more utopias

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there is no more attitude among us that man is moved to progress, no more belief that
man is destined to improve, to better his world, he is only moved to diminish as little as
possible, and so along with this how can we see ourselves as anything but failures, as
pathetic and as backwards as we used to think of our predecessors, so if we do fail we can
only point to ourselves and say, we will soon be nothing but idiots, the future will soon
paint us as fools. Despite being fools, we so fear being fools that we have made sure that
the future cannot be better than the present, and the best way to guarantee that is to make
sure the truly competent thinkers never gain a foothold to effect the change that would
make things better. And yet, the scientific apparatus must roll on, must continue to grind
and chug, and it must continue to produce, even if all it produces is crap, even if all it
produces is shit, even if all it does is reinvent what has already been invented,
reinvestigates what has already been investigated, reinvigorates what has already been
invigorated to death, even if all it does is prove wrong what has already been proven right
and prove right what has already been proven wrong, and then prove it right or wrong
again as soon as one can, as foolish as we are, we loathe the idea that we may be fools,
yet we love our fools all the same and so we ask our incompetent scientists not only to do
their experiments and publish their papers and give talks and participate in symposiums
we also ask them to write popular books, not on their areas of expertise per se but on the
topics people will buy to read on airplanes and at the beach, books on the nature of
things, books on the biology of sex, how exercising the mind can make us smarter, how
the earth is dying, how the universe is shrinking, how we can change for the better, and
on and on, books that have little if anything to do with science but have all to do with
feeding the scientific apparatus. The activities of the incompetent, the pseudo scientists

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are meaningless, thumb twiddling at best, drivel is all it is and to be honest most
experimentation is nothing but a waste of time and so I very rarely felt the need to lower
myself to the level of the incompetents and do their experiments to prove a point, in fact
my points were rarely perceived as worth proving, so why bother? My results would only
fuck up the system, not grease it, they would stop the wheels not keep them turning, they
threaten the enterprise and in any case I was one of the penanced ones, I had no home, no
laboratory, and so when I did feel the need to test an idea I did it in a way that I am sure
seemed totally primitive and unscientific to others. We are, in fact, a society that wants
nothing more than the incompetent to succeed, and so we will do everything we can to
ensure the incompetent succeeds, every academic institution is designed around the
pathetic need of our society to see the most competent of people thrust into failure while
enabling the most incompetent of people to be the ones who are successful. We enable the
most incompetent while we disable the most competent. The truly competent scientist
never gets the most desired and most stable positions at the best universities, the truly
competent, the truly creative and dedicated scientist always spends his life nearly
penniless as he travels from university position to university position, never enjoying the
stability of a familiar office, a place to put his books, a dedicated staff that knows his
name, a routine, something he can depend on day in and day out, no, the truly competent
scientist must uproot his life every few years if not more often, when the funding runs
out, when a new professor is hired, when a new incompetent is invited in to take his
place, when classes are cut, departments reorganized, universities never reorganize, never
create departments for the truly competent, they cut back existing departments so that the
truly competent scientist must once again pack his boxes and move his life to another

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university, another city, another state, look for another home, make a new set of friends,
although the truly competent scientist never really has any friends, how can he, moving
about like some nomad, he must start up again making new friends, start up again on the
experiments he did not get a chance to finish at the last university, start up again on the
book he had been writing before he was uprooted and so now he has to resettle himself,
unpack his boxes, look for his old notes, find the place where he left off last, and believe
me V this is all a very belittling and difficult existence, it is actually more of a penance, a
penance worse than incarceration, because lets face it, if you are locked up you at least
have the advantage of being in one place, no this is a terrible penance that our society
always serves up on the truly competent, forcing them to move constantly, paying them a
pittance, never giving them the stability or sustenance anyone needs to be able to finish a
thought let alone work of some significance. No, we do our best, in fact we do our very
best to practically kill the truly competent because we prefer the incompetent, we prefer
the process the incompetent brings to the scientific apparatus, the incompetent never
strives for anything of real importance, of any great and lasting significance, no, the
incompetent strives to keep things in motion, to keep the wheels of the scientific
apparatus moving, the worthless wheels of science, whereas the truly competent scientist
by his very nature seeks a way to stop those wheels, to force them to a halt, he seeks by
his nature to create a theory, demonstrate an idea, perfect a hypothesis which like a stone
in the great cogs of science will bring everything to a grinding halt, and this the wheels of
science cannot bear, cannot afford to have happen, to be halted, to halt the wheels of
science is to halt the flow of industry, and to halt the flow of industry is to stop the river
of money on which our society thrives. That there is no hope in all this is perhaps

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indicated best by the students, our next generation of thinkers who are in fact not thinkers
at all, never having been taught to think or motivated to think, made to be nothing but
bureaucrats at best. Kids taught not to think but to produce paperwork, not to challenge
the world of ideas, but to shift its contents around, carefully though so as to not to disturb
the universe too much. Our students are the most despicable students of all, and I know V
that you were one of them, but students today could not utter a single original thought if
you tortured them, I am not sure it is their fault, the scientific apparatus needs these
brainless students, these burgeoning bureaucrats, it needs these paper pushers, it needs
these nonthinking mindless automatons to carry out the ceaseless and mindless and
nonsensical activities that make up our most sacred academic institutions. These students
who are given their scholarships, their awards, their prizes, their stipends, to work and
think mindlessly, fill the laboratories in a fashion not unlike the mice and rats that fill the
laboratories, in fact what is the difference I sometimes think to myself, between the mice
and rats that fill the laboratories and the mindless students that fill the laboratories? That
answer is nothing! There is not a difference between the mice and rats and the students
who fill our laboratories. The only students who had a chance of having a single original
thought are expelled from the universities long before they can create a problem for the
scientific apparatus. They get a lower grade or miss a final or fail to get a paper in on
time, and for that they are persecuted, they are caught making a mistake and then they
lose their scholarship or fail to get a recommendation to advance, in either case they are
expelled in effect and an incompetent student is brought in to take the competent
students place, the incompetent student is given a scholarship, a stipend, all kinds of
awards, and so that is how the universities maintain the scientific apparatus with the most

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mice-like and the most rat-like of students. We think certain foreigners are the real role
models for our students, we think that there are some foreign students who are the
absolute epitome of how a student should be, how a student should behave, obedient and
quiet and studious, like automatons, in particular we think that the people in Asia are the
true automatons of the human race, we believe that the Chinese for example raise their
children and train their students to be nothing but obedient children and students by rote,
students by the book, perfect automatons, we believe that the Chinese could not produce
a thinker with an original thought to save its nation, when in fact the Chinese are
producing the true thinkers of the world especially if we compare them to the completely
brainless nonthinkers we produce in America, just because the Chinese may be quiet and
obedient, does not mean they are not thinkers or that they are not revolutionary thinkers
at that, just because these very qualities that we associate with nonthinkers, the qualities
of quietness and obedience, just because these qualities abound and are indeed best
exemplified by the Chinese does not mean that the Chinese are not revolutionaries, as the
fact is these qualities of quietness and obedience can and do coexist very well with the
qualities of thinking and with revolutionary thinking as well, and yet we still ask, how
can this be so, how can such opposite qualities exist in a person, who ever heard of a
quiet revolutionary or an obedient thinker? That would be unheard of we say, yet that is
exactly what we get with the Chinese, the quiet and obedient Chinese, who are in fact just
that and are in fact the most thinking of thinkers, and are in fact the most revolutionary of
revolutionary thinkers, just because they are quiet should be a good hint as to why they
are such good thinkers and just because they are obedient should equally be a hint as to
why they are so revolutionary, the fact is their quiet obedience is a reaction to their plight

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just as their revolutionary thinking is a reaction to their plight. Their plight is of course
that they are an oppressed race and an oppressed race will always rebel, albeit different
races rebel in different ways. Some oppressed races rebel with acts of violence, with
attacks on the establishment, with stones and bullets and massive demonstrations. Other
oppressed races rebel by creating their own subculture, its own music, it own language,
its own history. In other oppressed races, where neither the ability to rebel violently
exists nor the ability to create your own culture exists, the oppressed rebels in a quieter,
more obedient way, and these Chinese who cannot rebel in anyway, let alone by violence
or by creating a subculture, all they can do is become even more quiet and obedient while
they wait for the day, for the moment when rebellion will indeed be possible, which may
in fact never be possible, and so the Chinese perfect being quiet, perfect being obedient
as they are a truly oppressed race, oppressed both inside and outside, yet some will, some
day, find themselves suddenly in a position where they are no longer oppressed from the
outside such as the Chinese students who come here to American to study, these students
suddenly find themselves in an outside that is no longer oppressive, yet this does not
mean they rebel, no, they are still chained by the quiet obedience that denied their inner
oppression, the oppression on the inside, and so to anyone such as you or I upon casual
observation we can see someone quiet and obedient and mistakenly classify that person
as a nonthinker and certainly would never think of that person as a revolutionary thinker,
yet, in fact, if that quiet and obedient person was a Chinese chances are we would be
observing one of the most revolutionary thinkers in the world. We live in a time of great
fear of the Chinese. In fact, if we had anything to fear about the Chinese, it would be this,
that they are indeed the most revolutionary thinkers in the world. Our greatest fears

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should not be the massive, earth-tilting numbers of Chinese people, our fears should not
be that they will consume all the food on the planet, that they will burn all the fuel, or that
they will march across the globe and take over the world, no, our biggest fear of the
Chinese should be that they are the true revolutionary thinkers of the world and that is a
fear of no small significance. Now this does not apply to all Chinese, it does not apply to
the Chinese who were born here in America, even if they were born of Chinese parents,
as these Chinese children raised either in America did not grow up with the oppression of
their parents lives and since oppression is not, as far as I know, passed on in the genes
these children born here even of oppressed Chinese parents, not oppressed at all, and are
in fact as nonthinking and as nonrevolutionary as any other American students, and there
is no race of people that is best classified as nonthinking and nonrevolutionary as
American, regardless if these Americans are Anglo Americans or Chinese Americans, if
any race deserves definition as nonthinking it is American and if any race defines
nonrevolutionary it is American, and that is how our students make up the most bland and
boring class of students on earth, while the Chinese make up the most dynamic and most
dangerous students on earth. We purport to be more afraid of the foreigners from Mexico
and Central America and that we would welcome as many foreigners as possible from
China, yet in fact we welcome the foreigners from Mexico and Central America because
they will be nonthinkers and nonrevolutionaries like us while we deep down fear the
Chinese because they are the most revolutionary and dangerous thinkers in the world. We
laud the nonthinking students from the Americas and Europe because they fit so well into
the cogs of the scientific apparatus which requires an endless supply of automatons to
keep it moving, we fear the revolutionary students because they will be a stone in the

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those cogs and will bring the while scientific apparatus to a grinding halt. We are free
here in America but our freedom is really a freedom not to think, we are free to be
nonthinkers and that is what we are rewarded to be, that is truly what our freedom is all
about. Revolutionary thinkers do not receive scholarships or awards, only
nonrevolutionary thinkers win those awards, revolutionary thinkers are literally banned
from the universities and must flitter about in the community colleges, straggle about in
the state colleges, but rarely if ever get accepted into the finest universities and certainly
are not the ones who are the recipients of the scholarships and awards which represent the
only ways to complete a college education these days, or worse yet the revolutionary
students live in the streets, in the coffee and donut shops, in the libraries, in fact that is
where you will usually find the true revolutionary thinker today, in the libraries, in the
atrocious public libraries which are truly nothing more than insane asylums that house
and protect us from the revolutionary thinkers, for when does an ordinary nonthinker go
to a public library?

Never!

Who in their right mind would dare to go into such as horrid place as the public library,
such a horrid smelling, horrid looking place? Who would venture into that maze of
horridness, that depressing chamber of insanity, those sterile chambers of silence, who
would purposefully put themselves on those scuffed floors and against those
fingerprinted walls? No, our libraries are nothing but asylums for those revolutionary
thinkers who are in fact our insane, our incapacitated, this is where they go, this is where

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we banish them, give them at least some heat, a bathroom even though it is a bathroom as
vile as any bathroom can be, some wooden chairs, and a wooden table on which to stack
a pile of books, which is for the truly revolutionary thinker the only viable world he has,
the only viable world that exists in America, that pile of books, that is here he retreats,
that is where he lives, and so America builds the public library to house the true thinkers,
the insane of our society and we give them books just as we would give them
antipsychotics, antidepressants and antianxiety pills, if you dont believe me go there
yourself, spend an afternoon in the public library, sit down there for a few hours and
observe, and then tell me if I am right. Sit there and observe, you will see the truly
revolutionary thinkers there, at every table, reading and writing, making notes into the
books, making notes onto scraps of paper, into the pages of discarded telephone books as
they have no money to buy real paper, look around, in our rubbish, in the trash cans of the
public libraries, on the walls, look at the scribbles you see scrawled on the flyers for
music events for lost dogs, on the walls of the bathroom stalls written with shit from a
finger because the revolutionary thinker has no money for a pen, that is where you will
find the most brilliant treatises written by our most revolutionary thinkers, our ideas, our
theories, our hope as a human race has been relegated to the trash in our libraries, in our
garbage cans, left to waste in the floors, it is scraped off the table tops, wiped off the
walls, painted over on the bathroom stalls. I have often thought, V, how much could be
learned, how much could be gained by studying this trash, the walls, the carvings in the
tables. How much of our collective genius never is gathered into a tome for anyone else
to see. But just because we could see it, would we care, would we understand, would it
matter? Just as the library is our asylum, this island is my penitentiary, yet how

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emancipating incarceration can be V, but only for someone who appreciates freedom,
who enjoys freedom, someone who does not shrivel up in fear at the prospect of freedom
like most of our race. We are a stupid race, we epitomize stupidity, if there was ever a
race that could be photographed and put onto a poster for stupidity it would be our race,
of all the races in the world we are by far the stupidest, of all the races in the world we
cannot even compare with the next stupidest race, and this is because we are not just
stupid, we are not just a stupid race, we are a race that worships stupidity, some people
think that money is our currency, but stupidity is our currency, some people think that
capitalism is our state religion but stupidity is our state religion, some people think that
burgers are what we eat to thrive and survive but it is stupidity on which we thrive and
survive, and we are so ensconced in our own stupidity that we dare not even think that the
world can be better than it is or else we would immediately see how stupid we really are,
we dare not think that the future will offer us something more as that would further prove
we are so truly truly stupid, we believe we are better than our past, in fact we think
everyone in the past were only dullheaded fools, but we do no believe, not for a moment,
that our future will be better than our past or that we could possible be dullheaded fools
in the eyes of the people of the future, no that would again be to realize that we are
indeed as stupid as we indeed are. And so we are forced to create a society, to perpetuate
a race of nonthinkers and nonrevolutionaries or else we would suddenly face change and
look eye to eye into our terrifying stupidity. We are an educated race, but a stupid race, in
fact because we are educated we are a totally stupid race, we are a race whose stupidity
knows no bounds, we are infinitely stupid, stupid without limitation. That is one thing on
which Ping and I would agree upon without a quibble. However, Ping believed we are a

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stupid race yet Ping also believed that our stupidity was built not on something we
learned or acquired, but was something that was built into our mental fiber in much the
same was as flaws were built into our neuronal fibers and evil was built into our moral
fiber. Ping believed that we as a race had no choice but to be stupid, as this was in fact
our flawed constitution and so it defined us as a race as much as our attributes as a
species defined our race. In fact, Ping would go even further than this and say it was our
responsibility to act with this flawed predisposition to be stupid, to accept, in effect, that
we are a stupid and thereby limited race and so define our thoughts and theories around
this, our stupidity. This attitude was in fact that all of our theories were based on the
assumption that we were in fact brilliant and capable of brilliance, that we were
brilliantly cognizant beings not dullheaded stupid beings, so all of our theories, all our
approaches were based on the idea that we were all brilliantly cognizant when in fact all
that could be known about anything had to be based on the assumption, the fact according
to Ping, that we are dullheaded and stupid. On this point, Ping and I disagreed, I did not
disagree of course that as a race we are all dullheaded and stupid, but I would not go so
far as to call this dullheaded stupidness a genetic trait as Ping would, as in fact Ping
required. I would not feel comfortable with the idea that we are a race defined as much
by dullheaded stupidness as we are by the fact that we are bipedal and primates, yet Ping
saw no problem and actually saw no other choice but to classify our race as dullheaded
stupid in the same way he would classify us as bipedal primates. And the charm of Ping,
Pings charm to the very end, was that his attitude that we are a dullheaded and stupid
race applied to him as surely as it did to all the others, whereas some believed his
comments and outspokenness on our stupidity to be elitist to put it mildly, I know, and I

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know Ping, that he indeed put himself in the same dullheaded stupid category as the
others of our race. And his willingness to include himself in the classification had
nothing to do with the encephalitis he suffered as a child, despite his attempts to make us
believe so, no, his need to place himself with all the others of our race was because Ping,
despite his seemingly devout dedication to simplicity, despite his unerring devotion to
stripping down truth to the atom, he was deep down a man of categorical imperatives,
and one of his primary categorical imperatives of the human race was that the human race
was categorically and imperatively evil just as the human race was categorically and
imperative stupid. Based upon these categorical imperatives he could then proceed to
build his theory of our race, all theories of our race, all built now from data and
observation, and these efforts of his would not only fly in the face of his own devotion to
simplicity, his unassailable dedication to reductionism, it would destroy the worlds
collective efforts to find unity, it would catastrophically upend the scientific
establishments dependence on Occams razor to justify their efforts, and this would be
his theory and application of cluster theory.

Cluster theory was a cluster fuck

I once said, not to Ping, but to someone else. In fact, I wrote a limerick once:

Clusters grow with spit and luck

A goose is a bird and a bird is a duck
Its anything goes

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As far as anyone knows
Whats cluster theory but a cluster fuck

Which, for some reason, caught on and made its way through the hallways of academia,
echoing its way around the world so to speak and back again to Ping, but when that echo
had returned to Ping, it had lost my signature so to speak and so when it came back to
Ping it came back as anonymous as if the world itself had uttered this single resounding
condemnation of his theory and, well, this nearly killed Ping. And so I guess you could
say I nearly killed Ping, yet at the same time, because of this incident, because of the
cluster theory is a cluster fuck echo incident, and because of my role in creating this
saying in the first place and so therefore because of my role in nearly killing Ping, I had
no choice, no choice whatsoever to step in by his side when this echo had returned and
nearly destroyed him, I had no choice but to stand by him and defend him against my
own saying, and thereby defend him against the world, and so I stepped up to the
devastated Ping and told him that he had to stand up to this jeer, that he alone was the one
who would continue on and prove the world was wrong, to have the last laugh, I said to
Ping, that is all we all live for, that is all we ever live for, to have the last and the most
resounding laugh of all, and to tell you the truth Ping, very few of us ever even have the
opportunity to have the last laugh but you, you by god, you have that chance now and I
will do all I can Ping to make sure you get that last laugh. And you know what, to my
utter amazement, Ping did it, he picked himself up, he pulled himself together and he
went on to make cluster theory the most widely applied theory in scientific history, all
because I had nearly killed him, all because I had too much guilt to let him die, and the

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rest as they say, was history. Ping believed medicine was a science of attrition, but he
was wrong, mankind is a victim of attrition, but science and medicine will survive the
individual, will continue to grow, to improve, while the individual withers and rots. The
patient dies, the doctor grows old and withers away, but our knowledge of medicine
grows, our knowledge of how to save a life is never in our head, it is in many heads, it is
in books, it is in libraries, it is in videos, audiotapes, it is in the jungles, it is in the oceans.
Our knowledge of how to save a life is in the past and it is in the future, because every
day, probably every minute of every day, a doctor reaches into the unknown for a new
way of doing something, a new approach, a new attack on a problem, and he is reaching
blindly, which is the only way you can reach into the future, blindly, and he pulls
something out, which if it works, will be proclaimed a miracle, an act of genius, if it
doesn't work, it will be called a scam, a sham, a heretical act of violence upon mankind.
And it may take months, it may take years, it may take decades before society weighs in
on its opinion. That is a luxury society has, it has time, it has the ability to redefine, to
articulate itself. The doctor only has one chance, he acts then and there with what he has
and if it is right, he is a hero, it he is wrong, he has to learn to reach out again the next
time and the next time, with some faith that one time he will be right, with the knowledge
that by doing so, by acting in this way, that is the only way we advance. Listen, when I
was working to provide surgical treatments to violent prisoners, it wasnt ethics or
morality that stopped us, hell no, the courts would not consider psychosurgery because
they were fearful of a bunch of convicts seeking lobotomies and amygdalectomies as get
out of jail free cards. We are a people who are who we are because of the risks we take,
not because of what we have inherited. We are a product of what we hope is the future,

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not so much a product of our past. That is the difference between man and animals, V,
not God, not religion, not mathematics, not any of that stuff. It is that we will take risks
at what we hope is the Truth. You may say, like Ping once said, that we are beings that
seek truth, but I think we only hope for the truth. You dont seek what you know you will
never find, but you can hope and hope and never stop hoping regardless of how hopeless
it is that you will find it and that is who I think we are. And along the way, we must
accept that some things will happen, some people will be hurt, some will die.
These kinds of statements from you remind me of what many say about you. That
you are more a philosopher than a scientist. In fact, the strongest attacks against you
seem to actually come from the philosophical community, not the scientific.

Why is that?

Well V, actually I have been hoping that someone such as you would come up with an
answer to that question for me. Because I sure the fuck cant. American philosophy is
probably in a worse condition than American science, American philosophy is probably
even more pathetic than American politics, in fact I would say if you were to choose the
one area of academia that was the most pathetic it would be American philosophy.
American philosophy is so pathetic that it does not matter any more, American
philosophy cannot lay claim to one idea or school of thought that really has made any
difference in the world, all American philosophy has done is make the world worse off
for all philosophers around the world, including the philosophers who are actually doing

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something that matters, offering us ideas that have some substance, that have some
bearing on the reality of things. American philosophers cannot even give us a small
something to chew on, they cannot give us anything that even makes any sense let alone
give us something to work with. They are the most pathetic of the academics, and how
they got there is no surprise as that is what America is all about, obliterating what could
have an impact on our lives, on our way of thinking, and grinding that into dust. While I
was at the major universities in America, invariably, just in the course of a few decades,
all these universities, once the pillars of thought not only in our country but in the world,
all of them decided to reduce and in some cases get rid of all together their philosophy
departments. While I was at the University of C, I had some very good friends in the
philosophy department, I used to enjoy going there for an afternoon, getting away from
the absolutely brainless environment of the university hospitals, I would go up the hill to
the philosophy department and chat with a few of the professors there, probably the same
ones you say were out to get me, one of those, Rudolf Carnap, he and I would discourse
in Esperanto, something he loved to do, but over the course of my stay at the University
of C which was not much more than four years, they cut back that department and I saw
what effect that had on those brilliant and dedicated men, by the time the university was
done with its cutbacks and reorganizations, that department was nothing compared with
what it had been and the men were nothing who they had been, they had been reduced to
nothing but ghosts of themselves, they had grown leaner, they were bent over, you could
see the strain in their faces, how can anyone work like that, let alone think like that? The
same thing happened when I went to Ping University and then again at H University. The
same death by starvation, the same wasting away, the same terrible plight. I think some

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of these brilliant men tried to resurrect their careers by turning to new subjects, subjects
that had some import for the rest of the world, but how can you do this? You dedicate
your entire life and career to Frege or Descartes and now suddenly you think you can
write about something else let alone write about the real world? You study Frege for 40
years and you become Frege, you study Descartes for 40 years and you become
Descartes. You reach a point where you cannot change even if you want to, you cannot
be someone or something that you are not, not after all those decades of doing nothing
but trying to be a Frege or a Descartes. You are who you made yourself to be. That is
why American philosophy is so pathetic V, it is nothing but a gaggle of professors who
have made themselves into something they wanted to be, they made themselves into
Frege when in fact Frege is not something anyone should want to be, they made
themselves into Descartes, into Kant, into Wittgenstein for a truly ridiculous example.
American philosophers were not individuals really at all, they were reincarnations of
Frege and Descartes and Kant and Wittgenstein, and so when it came time to realize the
error of their ways, what did they do? They tried to do only what they knew how to do,
they tried to make themselves into something else, into someone else, when it became
apparent how ridiculous it was to be Frege, they tried to make themselves into
Wittgenstein. When they discovered how terribly obnoxious it was to be Kant, they tried
to make themselves into Dewey. Meanwhile, other countries were churning out
philosophers who actually had something to say, philosophers like Foucault and Derrida
and Baudrillard, philosophers who if you mentioned their name elicited only a laugh and
some errant spittle off the tongues clicking in condescension from the American
philosophers, the same pathetic American philosophers who were nothing but born again

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Freges and Kants. Heaven forbid philosophy should incorporate history into its method
of inquiry, heaven forbid philosophy should look at the present for answers or even
questions, heaven forbid philosophy should look at itself and actually laugh a little at
what it sees there.

Winds are audible on the tape now

The skies outside have turned dark, the light in this outdoor area emanating from the
candles which add a flicker to his face while he talks, a ruddiness to his cheeks, flames
that seem to catch on his moist lips. When he lights his pipe his entire face ignites before
the yellow flame, his eyes squinted against the plumes of sulfur, hands cupped around the
pipe bowl as the wind circles around us now. Sometimes I think if there is one defining
quality to our times, V, he said, it is the separation between value and belief. I believe at
one time it would have been quite disturbing to most people to have a separation between
what we feel is correct and what we believe is the case, that tension, no, that terror we
feel when we feel so disconnected is gone, no longer are we terrified, no longer are we
even concerned, that is the real pathology in our culture. It is ubiquitous to the point of
being totally expected. We are so confused as a culture or a race as to what we believe,
as to what matters, as to what we feel and how we should feel, we no longer can
distinguish what we feel from what we should feel, we can no longer draw a line between
what we think versus what we should think, let alone, heaven forbid, what we would like
to think. People in a sense have ceased to be people, we have taken what we think of as
the communist form of brainwashing to a whole another degree, we have created a new

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character within ourselves which cannot by its nature do anything, and by so doing have
created both a collective paralysis as well as our ultimate doom, like robots now we will
seek to find ways to change things that are destructive in our society but we will fail, like
robots we will seek to find ways to make ourselves happy but we will fail, because in fact
that is not what people seek, we seek what is in our dreams, what is in our fantasies, true
we may find ways to make these real and of import for all of us, but that remains to be
seen, maybe that is the last frontier, V, to make us all content by allowing us to believe in
our dreams, but imagine the consequences of that V, dreams are filled with what we not
dare think or believe, they are filled with all we should not and dare not and would not
but would love to, it may be natural part of being a human being to seek out the dare nots
regardless of what is permissible, maybe there is no reprieve from this, maybe there is no
solution that does not create exactly what we are trying to destroy, maybe this is a circle
of doom for the human being, its ultimate downfall, but at no time like today are we in
such a time of crisis, V, from this small village that calls itself a country, to the
superpowers and the industrial giants, we are facing challenges that people are afraid to
address, let alone solve. We dont have the tools, we doesnt have the freedom, we dont
have the desire, that is what I think is truly at the heart of all this, we dont have the
desire to fix things, to solve things, to understand things anymore. We dont have new
philosophers who we admire or hell who we hate for that matter! Even if we had people
to hate we would probably be just fine! We cant seem to find a new movement of artists
to define us, instead we continue to ruminate on the ones past, weeding out the
membership in the last generation of artists as we play our games trying to find the few
who will fill the final slim pages in some history book on our times. Where are the

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authors, the playwrights, the poets we either love or people want to burn? They have all
died long ago. Who are the real enemies today? We know what we want to believe, but
we do not always believe in that. We know what values we think are important, but we
do not always adhere to those values. The world has changed in a very important and
remarkable way, V, it has changed in a way that we no longer hold our own beliefs, we no
longer champion our own values. So who does? Where does our moral leadership come
from? I am not sure we know. All we know are slogans, bumper stickers, phrases we are
taught to remember, songs we learn to sing, faces we learn to admire, faces we learn to
hate, we dont know anything else, we dont know the other side, the real story, the
history of what was, the plot to how it all came to be, we only know a blurb, we only
know an utterance, and we all know the feeling when someone actually asks us to
expound on something we said, we dont know what to say, we are baffled, bumfuddled,
we are asked to defend something we said and we cant come up with a bloody thing in
our defense, we are asked to understand why we believe something is so and so and we
simply dont know, and that is how the whole world operates now, V, on bits and pieces
of useless information, but these bits and pieces are somehow tied into one big machine
that churns and chugs and carries us all along, and there may have been a day when one
of us could have suddenly stopped and challenged all this, but I am deathly afraid that
those days are gone, that the chance of anyone doing this is gone, that the days of
reflection, the days of introspection are not just gone, V, they are useless, for even greater
than the fear I have that the days of reflection are gone, my fear that the days of reflection
are useless is even greater, for certainly there are others besides myself who are
struggling with this issue, with this terrible dilemma and yet we cannot and perhaps most

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frighteningly will never find a solution, not because we dont have the ability but because
having that ability no longer matters, and so V we have entered a very dark period
indeed, so dark we cannot even see how terrible this darkness is, I used to think we were
all anaesthetized, oblivious to it all, but I realize that was a weak willed way of
approaching this problem, we are not anesthetized in the least, we feel every sting, ever
hurt, the problem is there is nothing we can do about it, one of the first drugs developed
for anesthesia was curare, a chemical some Indians in South American used to paralyze
their prey, physicians took curare and begin to use it on their patients to operate, to
remove limbs, to remove gall bladders, even to operate on the heart, patient after patient
would wake up and tell the doctors in horrified voices that they had indeed been awake
through the entire operation, they had felt and watched every incision, the doctors said
this was preposterous, they could see the patients were anaesthetized, they lay there
motionless with no expression on their face the entire time, that this was simply a
hysterical reaction to the trauma and not real at all, and so for years they proceeded to use
curare on patients, finally one young doctor had to have an operation on himself and so
he was given the curare and as he lay there he underwent the entire horrifying experience
of feeling and seeing everything but had absolutely no ability to tell anyone until hours
later, until several excruciatingly painful hours later when the curare wore off was he able
to tell the doctors what had happened, still they would not believe him, thinking he was
succumbing to the same hysteria as the other patients, that was until this young doctor
disclosed that he had heard the surgeon and the nurse talking about their affair, down to
the detail. This is how I feel we are V, we are not anesthetized and so we feel everything
that is happening, we are aware of it all, we simply cannot react, we dont know what to

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do, there is nothing we can do, we are taking a form of curare which will not allow us to
do anything but wait to wake up from this horrible nightmare. Why are so many people
killing other people senselessly, not just dictators in certain countries, not just car
bombers and suicide bombers, but young men who walk into universities and shoot
students they never knew, or people who drive their cars head-on into others. What I
think is interesting to notice V is that these killers do not kill only others, they do not kill
only strangers, but they also end up killing themselves, they do not see a difference
between themselves and these strangers, they do not know where their fear and terror for
what else can drive them to such actions lies. Is it in them? Is it in all these other people
who are just like me? Am I them or am I me? All of this confusion V is now becoming
manifest in ways we dare not think about, I am not even sure we regard killing the same
way we did years ago, I am not sure it means the same thing to us today to kill or be
killed, but we are not allowed to think another way than that it is wrong, yet something is
telling us it is okay, we can do it, and that voice is not inside us, it is outside us, it is all
around us, what happens to our ideas of schizophrenia and depression if the disease is no
longer in a person, but in the entire race, spread throughout the society, what if the voice
we are trying to react to is calling to us from several different mouths, what if the brains
that are dysfunctional are only dysfunctional as a group. There are ideas and concepts, V
that we are not ready to place on the philosophical table, they have no place, they will not
be considered. Yet, we as a people continue to drown in the fear and pain and terror that
we feel and cannot express. We dont know what is right or wrong anymore, we want to
rebel but we dont know what to rebel against, the causes are no longer clear, if existent
at all, yet we rebel still in ways that we feel compelled to rebel such as stealing a towel

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from a hotel, leaving off an item on our taxes, not wearing our seat belt on a plane, eating
some grapes before we reach the check out counter, but all of these acts of rebellion are
pathetic, stupid even, only pointing out how desperate we are to rebel, to find a reason to
rebel, to feel some boundaries and understand what those boundaries are, the need to
exert some control, to say this is me versus this is the system out there, fuck you, I can eat
a grape for free! We are rebelling at the conclusion that seems apparent to us now, that we
are not individuals, that we lost the right to be an individual long ago, the killer is not
killing as senselessly as we think, he is killing what he believes is the enemy, the cause of
his pain, what is more natural than that? And that cause he is after is you, I, everyone
including himself, when there are no individuals there is only everyone. When he shoots
strangers in a school or church he is not just shooting at strangers he is killing everyone
in every church, in every school. Most of us steal grapes, which is stealing from
everyone, but in a crazy way stealing a grape gives me a center I can call me when I do.
Somewhere along the way we lost our minds V, and in some ways I think that will
ultimately be our salvation. Crazy to think, no pun intended, that insanity will cure us.
Who but the insane sees the real problem, allows himself to feel the real conflict, actually
seeks a solution no matter how desperate that may be? The solution may not be pretty,
but wars are never pretty and maybe what we are seeing is a new kind of war, a war of
something against itself, a true war of good versus bad, of the individual against the
nonindividual, maybe it will continue to grow, continue to escalate, there seem to be no
signs of all this craziness abating, but it is a battle and we dont succumb to anything
peacefully, we dont give up our oil without a fight, we dont give up our trade routes
without a fight, we dont give up our drugs without a fight, why would we give up our

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sanity without a fight? Even here, on this little island, the insanity is coming here as well.
It is inevitable, but like all those science fiction novels, who knows, what mutation will
occur at the last minute before we succumb to chaos and destruction? Change does not
come from a perceived necessity to change, change comes from a mutation in thought, a
mutation in character, a mutation in our systems that arises when we least expect it. And
so honestly I dont expect change to occur except when some Chinese poet finds a new
verse that strikes a chord around the world, or some six year old idiot savant in India
comes up with a new economic theory that shifts the paradigms, it will be something like
that, something completely unexpected, completely unforeseen, something that will start
the next real war, not our peacekeeping forces in Afghanistan, not the small guerilla
attacks we see now, but a wave of destruction, a wave of attrition as the old falls aside to
let forth the new, and only the insane, V, will have the privilege to see that this will be.
So why did they attack me? Fuck if I know, V. The great Rudolf Carnap, with whom I
chatted about the role of science in political thought, once called me the Butcher of
Westwood. Alonzo Church, the legendary Alonzo Church, told a demonstration of
students that if they wanted to stop thinking, to go see me, I could put an end to that.
Carnap, Church, and who knows who else? But who are these people, who remembers
them now? No one, and I doubt anyone ever will. Like I said, maybe someone like you
will come up with an answer. I sure dont know what it is.

When people talk about you 20 years from now

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what would you like to be remembered for? He grunts. Interesting question V. Believe it
or not, I have not thought much about it. I may have thought more about what I dont
want to be remembered for. He laughs. (long pause) You know V, I had always
thought I would write a book. For the longest time I thought the best thing for me to do
was to write a book. I have in fact said that on more than one occasion, I have said to
someone or another, you know what? I think I should write a book. The next question of
course is: What is the book going to be about? Well, I never let on to that. I wasnt sure
it would be very well accepted. You see, I always wanted to write a book about pleasure.
You know pleasure, right? The simplest thing in the world. Everyone knows what
pleasure is, everyone understands what pleasure is. For some, it may seem like the most
worthless of topics to write upon. They would prefer that I wrote about a new theory of
violence, or a reflection on how human thought has fucked up this world, or some
nonsense like that. I could easily write a book, fill a book with reflections on my friends
such as Fidel and Chanco and Tim and Albert (pause) and Ken, Ken Kesey even, yes, we
were friends, but now that dude was a mess. I could write an entire book on my
experiences alone with Herr Arnold Schonberg who spent more than a troubled night with
me as he fought to create music outside the brains parameters, a madness I believe was
caused by his music, not a music created from madness, for his music was anything but
mad, yet I still have a theory which I think someone should pursue, a theory that the
atonal melodies he cherished actually create disruptive patterns in the brain, patterns that
are somehow akin to patterns of violence and so we react with anger to this music when
we first hear it, youth which is always looking for an outer analogy to their inner rhythms
of rage finds a riotous haven in his music, and so the world as it grew angry with itself

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and sought a counterpoint to its own complacency and so called enlightenment began to
actually believe and understand Herr Schonberg. As a young psychiatrist I had befriended
and often sat with the elderly genius, a brilliant painter as well as a composer, until
finally as he slowly succumbed to triskaidekaphobia, the fear of the number thirteen,
believe it or not, I witnessed for myself how little I knew, how little I could do for a man
of such substance and imagination. But what would be the real point in detailing these
accounts? I cant imagine putting together such a book. No, I imagine my book would
be simply about pleasure, and it would be a thin book, a tidy volume, concise, to the
point. It needs to be, because it is such a simple concept right? We all know all we need
to know about pleasure. Dont we? Problem is we know nothing about it at all. And that
would be the point of my book. I think if we took a look at how little we knew about
what seems most basic and most common, we would then begin to know something
about ourselves. So my answer is I would like to be remembered for having pointed out
how good we are at getting on with life given how little we fucking know. (long pause)
Nah, he laughed, thats not true. You know what V, if I am to be remembered for
anything, Id like to be remembered for the fact that I stuck to my guns, V, that I did not
bend to solicitations, I did not grab my ankles for money, I did not give in to pressure, to
colleagues, to a bunch of college kids camping outside my office, to protestors burning
my effigy in the streets, I did not bend to the government spooks who followed me like I
was some spy, to the journalists who offered me money and sex for a story, I did not bend
to the fact there is no democracy, no justice, no sign of intelligent life in the universe, no
God in this world that we could ever understand, but more than that, I never gave into the
idea that truth was relevant let alone important, that what we did was right, that whatever

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we discovered would not some other day be undiscovered or simply forgotten, for what
are we but a race that forgets more than it remembers, a species that has evolved a special
ability to forget, we are a society that is built upon the principal of forgetting not
remembering, we have somehow lost the faculty to remember, forgetting is the
foundation of our knowledge today, not remembering, not memorializing, but forgetting,
dismissing, ignoring. And so I would in fact like to be remembered for what no one
remembers me for, for what I have been forgotten for, and that is that I originated three
ideas that have had a significant if not major impact on how we think, these three ideas
each came to me at around the same time, but I released them at different times, in
different ways, for the impact of each idea was indeed individually significant if not
shattering in its own way, to have released all three at once would have been devastating,
too much too soon, no one would have believed these ideas all at once let alone taken any
one of them seriously, and so I planned their release one at a time, not in the forum most
would choose for the announcement of ideas of such import, no, I issued them in the
confidence of a comrade, someone I knew would take the idea and take it for their own,
even if they would forever know it was my idea and not theirs, they would, I knew,
eventually, gradually, take on the idea as their own, the longer it percolated in their brain
and the longer from the time when I gave them the idea, usually in its entirety, usually in
conjunction with the destruction of an idea of theirs, which while similar, was inadequate
and insufficient in ways they had not seen or realized and so I would bring this forth in a
discussion or argument in some way and with that, with the demolition of their idea,
which they of course viewed in the highest esteem, had already written publications and
maybe even books upon this idea of theirs, but of which they did not, could not see the

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flaws that I would then, having the opportunity, illuminate for them, and so when their
idea, which had at one time been a good, a seemingly solid idea, one on which a great
deal of research, work and money could be made, now was exposed for how anemic and
pathetically flawed it was, and my listener was on the verge of collapse, his defiance and
his arguments exhausted, that is exactly the point when I would point out the fact that his
idea was in fact on the right track, that in fact if he had only taken it a little further, in a
slightly different direction he would in fact have arrived at a point that was much like my
idea and with that I gave him my idea with enough preamble and reference to his idea to
give him hope that this could have been his idea if he had only taken his idea, the lesser
idea, one step further, if he had not been so caught up in preserving his lesser idea, which
while it looked brilliant and profitable, was really a dead end, and so now he is revived
with my idea which will out of his own need for survival and the survival of his selfesteem quickly become his idea and with that and with him as my vector, I will have
released my idea out into the world, and I tried to do this with Ping, I tried so many times
with Ping, over and over again I tried this with Ping, tried to get him to dispose of his
often rather stupid ideas and embrace my ideas, but Ping was a stubborn fool, a
completely iron willed and stubborn fool, and so no matter how many times I tried to
destroy his ideas and replace them with my ideas, he always fought back, he always
resisted, there were times I thought this was the strongest willed man I had ever met,
there were times I simply thought he was retarded, dumb as a rock, in any case, I had to
move forward and I did so with other men, so I did this with the first of the three ideas,
and when that idea had been successfully launched, I did the same thing with the second
idea, and then the third. The three ideas were all related, but had to be released as I said

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separately, one before the other. First, I came up with the idea that meaning was a brain
activity, and that all our ideas about meaning, intentionality, truth, these all had to come
from an understanding of how the brain works, not from some understanding separate
from the brain, not identical to the brain, but as a relationship to the brain and its
function. This was to say that your world exists inside your head and my world exists
solely in my head, but it is not to say that your world is the only world or my world is the
only world, for even though my brain cannot mix with your brain, we share the world in a
way, even though we can never know that for sure we know things in common about the
world, many things, we know more things in common perhaps than we know distinctly
about the world, even though we can never know with any certainty, we can believe that
certain things are true, but we will never know for sure. All we can know is that we
know something, and it is a fucking marvelous process, this knowing about something.
Yes, I came up with this idea, against the idea that brains were simply vats of chemicals,
computer-like processes, nets of neural networks, a multilayered series of instinctual
reactions, brains are chemicals but minds are not and minds are brains. Minds are
meanings and meanings are not chemicals but meanings come from brains. Meanings are
states of the brain, but they are not identical to the states of the brain, yet, they can only
be understood by starting with the brain and how it works, not by starting with a
computer and how it works, not by starting with a gene and how it works. My idea, my
contribution, V, was that we need to start with how the brain works and build from there.
We keep trying to apply our clever metaphors, but by doing so we ignore something very
important, we ignore the fact that the brain is made up of something very unique and
special, it is made up of neurons, and groups of neuron and networks of these groups and

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all sorts of structures and functions that further define or begin to define how the brain
works, there are neurotransmitters and neuromodulaters, and hormones and other
chemicals we have not discovered yet and cells we have not defined yet and electrical
impulses we dont have machines to see yet and patterns we have not even glimpsed yet,
but none of this matters for what I had to say, for what I had to contribute. For what I did
say was that our starting point had to be the brain, not some philosophical argument, not
some linguistic turn, not some mathematical equitation, not some psychoanalytic analogy.
All those other methods were simply crutches to get us through the pain of not knowing,
the agony of our own stupidity. We still need to start at the bottom and work our way up.
And the bottom is a scary place, V, the bottom is a disheveled, terrible place, a place of
chaos and noise. Yet look what the brain makes out of all that chaos and noise, some of
the most beautiful music, the most wonderful poetry, the most incredible paintings, the
brain somehow stands in front of this chaos and noise and takes it in and without
hesitation shouts back, I love that color blue or I hear the train coming or I love you too.
The brain does even more wonderful things than that, it decides that it wants to do
something, it takes initiative, it plots a course, it changes its mind, it admits to a mistake,
it watches itself, it makes comments on its own behavior, it regrets, it resolves to do
something again and do it better. And sometimes I think that is only the beginning. A
brain can write a book, a brain can read a book written by someone else and understand
it, a brain can read a book written by someone else to a group of people and they will
understand it. All of this happens out of chaos, V, that is where it begins. That was the
first part of my theory, perhaps not a theory per say as much as a pointing in a vague
direction, one that was and is being followed by many, although I doubt I will ever be

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remembered and certainly never be thanked for my contribution to this. For most people,
that one idea would have been enough, that one idea would have been adequate to fill a
life, to sap the concentration of an entire career, but I could not stop there. My second
idea was that we do not learn unless we unlearn. We only learn something new by
unlearning the old. We do not add on top of, we tear down and rebuild a new. We do not
create endless shelves of books, we rewrite and erase and write over and cross out and
edit and reedit again. The brain changes as we learn, it grows stronger, builds synaptic
connections, establishes networks, creates fields of activity. But many of these
connections are not necessary, they are a result of the noise and chaos that the brain sees
as any other activity. The most important things, the things we need to focus on, a piece
of yellow fruit, a receptive mouth, words of wisdom, these are things that get
strengthened more than the noise that constantly bombards us. Yet all these activities
build stronger synapses, create connections. So when we sleep, when we drink, when we
fuck, we engage in behaviors that essentially tear these connections down, this is
unlearning, the brain loosens up, and all connections loosen up equally. So that the weak
connections which were created as the result of the noise we take in, these go first, the
stronger connections, the banana or a womans lips, these remain, so when we wake up or
sober up we keep those memories but the fly on the windowsill that we never noticed, the
sunlight through the palm tree fronds, the hundreds of faces in the crowds we passed, the
numbers on a stray piece of paper, all of these are gone, having made room for a new
round of learning. And again, my second idea would have been all that a researcher
could have made this his career, it would have made his career, would have defined his
life, would have given him a place in the history books, yet I was not done there. My

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third idea was that a brain process was not an isolated event in one or another particular
part of the brain, instead, a brain process, something that has meaning, was a function of
the entire brain, that areas of inactivity, no activity or simply chaotic activity played a
role just as areas that showed spikes and volumes of activity, the brain was not a
computer, was not a set of transistors, it was an total, organized organ that needs to be
evaluated and understood in all its totality, and that this was a differentiating mark in the
study of the brain and brain functions. And I suggested that we had to go even further, to
completely understand the brain we had to look not at a single brain but collectives of
brains, societies of brains, whole populations of brains that were connected perhaps by
immaterial things like words and gestures, but connected none the less and so imbued
with a role in meaning and significance. And with that I invited the union between the
material and nonmaterial, I spelled out the formula for solving the conundrums of
linguistic meaning and philosophical intention without the illusions of metaphysics or
spiritual silliness, without the crutches of Platonic forms or Kantian imperatives, I created
the path that would show the way to a meaningful understanding of the brain and the
mind, the mind and the brain, without the need for ESP or ethers or psychic radiations.
My fourth idea is one that I am still mulling over, one that I have released to a few like
thinkers who have against my own judgment have gone running with this idea, these
people are not brain scientists, not even scientists at all, although they think they are, they
are engineers really, mechanical engineers, some guys who grew up in the old Soviet
Union and so with freedom discovered a world of ideas and in this orgy of discovery I
shared with them my idea one night over some vodka and cigars aboard a Cuban trawler,
the captain of which being a friend of mine, You may think that these contributions would

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have been enough in one mans life, that having offered these to the totality of mans
ideas about himself would be all one could expect from ones rather insignificant life, all
one could ask, perhaps more than one could expect or ask, yet, not only will I never be
credited with these ideas, not a footnote or comment, and not only will I never be allowed
to take credit for these ideas, but I would be ridiculed if I attempted such a things. You
see V, these ideas changed the world, they changed how everyone, whether they agreed or
disagreed, it didnt matter, these ideas changed how they thought, it changed how they
answered their own questions, these ideas gave even my sharpest critics pause, it made
then double up their efforts to defend themselves, it made the obvious no longer so
obvious, it tore apart the long standing tautologies that had been the building blocks for
so long for so many men and universities, and perhaps most significantly it gave a new
basis and new life to a new movement in science, it created a new department of study, it
generated a new group of researchers and thinkers and with them the new group of
students that came with them, and with that it created the new textbooks, the new lecture
circuits, the new pamphlets, the new revision of the old books, it created like all moments
do, an industry, and when that happens, V, suddenly there is no more room for criticism
anymore. The industry cannot afford new criticism as long as it is still generating its
income from the new sciences, it needs to sell a certain amount of books, it needs to fill a
certain number of chairs and likewise fill a certain number of auditoriums with students
who will eagerly pay to learn about this new science. And so it will not listen to me now,
V, it will not listen to what I ultimately have to say. It cant afford to. I gave these ideas
to others to take as their own and so to seed and populate the world, because by the time I
was ready to hand these ideas over to someone else and give them the glory and acclaim

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for having brought these ideas to the attention of the world, I had already looked beyond
these ideas and saw the hostile landscapes to which they pointed. Just as I was the only
one to take these new ideas of mine, to take my contributions and take them on, give
them life, make them known, I was the only one to look beyond the excitement they
generated, to peek around the corner, to seek what lay beyond the horizon so to speak.
And what I found there was truly confounding V. I did not expect to find what I found.
Where all this leads V is in one of two directions. One direction says that we are smart
enough to understand ourselves. And that is the direction that most will ever follow. Yet
there is a second direction, which says, that if you look at all the evidence, and remember
we have all the data we need, so if you look at all the data, what you begin to see is that
something is wrong, V, something is very wrong. If you look at the salamander and
understand its patterns of intentionality, then if you look at the dog and understand its
patterns of intentionality, and continue up to the monkey, the ape, to the human,
something begins to happen. You see brains growing in ways that never grew before, you
see lobes appearing, structures appearing, and then of course you see behaviors
appearing, behaviors that are not the simple intentional behaviors of the salamander or
the dog even, but behaviors that are based on something that is modulating behavior in a
different way, now all of a sudden new behaviors occur not due to some stimulus or need
within the organism, but because the organism has decided to change that behavior for
what ever reason. And what is important V is that these behaviors change because of a
reason, not because of an excuse, but due to a reason. And with that, we now can begin
to question it all. We have human reasons making its own decisions not based on what it
learned or what it knows or what it inherited or instinctually must do it just does for the

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sake of doing. We have evolved away from a having a strong link to our world, we have
evolved in order to react with ourselves, to react outside the world altogether, to react to a
virtual world we create among ourselves, and upon this world we make up new rules, we
create ideas, we construct guidelines and laws and regulations and rewards. We still mate
and fuck and fall in love, but we create new ways of doing that that transcend our bodies.
We still eat and seek shelter, but we create new ways of doing that that transcend the
physical world. We have created new patterns V, patterns that are not based any longer
on the old substrate of stimulus and genes, but patterns that are based on a new substrate
that we rule and create and weave. And the problem V is that we now no longer have a
basis by which to believe that what we are doing is fit or not fit, is right or wrong, sane or
insane. We are no longer in a position to know, to control, to understand. Our apparatus
has outgrown its foundation in anything that can give us that support or comfort. We all
know this, V, that is the funny thing, we all know this and so why else do we drink and
drug ourselves, why else do we seek therapy or stand in line to have our frontal lobes
hacked from our brains. We know what the cancer is, V, and we want to remove it. We
want it gone. We have come to realize that the most, no the only miserable aspect to life
is being able to relive it over and over again. And that is what self consciousness is. We
can be free and conscious without self consciousness, and without it we would probably
be as happy as can be. And then the second thing, my own response to my second
contribution is that as it is clear that learning is not the fundamental process of the brain,
unlearning is, or unlearning is perhaps the process of the brain, the one that determines
learning, then you eventually see the more you look at the brain and how it works, how
we know it works, how it ages, how it morphs, you will see that the main process in the

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brain is attrition, V, not growth and development, but attrition, we lose cells we dont gain
cells, we lose connections we dont make new connections, we lose strength, we lose
memories, we all hopelessly glide towards knowing less and believing less, to be able to
understand less, we all graduate towards a life of not wanting to know, not caring, and
this is not just looking at the person, V, this is true across our race, across our society, we
are a society that is based on unlearning, not learning, all of our processes of survival are
based on not knowing, not understanding, we seek sleep, we seek drink, we seek video
games, we seek TV, we seek sex, we seek trances, we seek escape, we seek all the process
that are the processes of unlearning, we seek to be loosened from all we know, to be
distanced from what we can know, we are a society in a trance, we are zombies, we are
dead, we are never going to get any better. And finally V, with respect to my third
contribution, we pride ourselves on being a society that admires and loves each other, we
like to think that we are members of some close-knit cohesive unit, we like to think that
we are a family, a town, a school, a state or a country. We would like to think that the
hormones which guide us are the ones that make us feel good, the serotonins and
endorphins, and that our problems come when we dont get enough of these. The fact of
the matter is, V, we are a race that loves to hate, we are a race that is addicted to violence
and rage. And this is due to hormones that control these emotions, the norepinephrines
and vasopressins, not due to the lack of hormones that make us feel good, it is due to the
structures of the brain and how those structures are wired, it is due to the evolutionary
imbalance we have acquired that rules our lives. We should in fact be studying why it is
we hate, yet it is a subject no one wants to study, no one even cares to admit exists.
Someday, someone will come along and write the real psychiatric textbook on the human

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condition and that will be that the human condition is based on hate, not love, on tearing
things apart not on cohesion, on destroying, dismantling, dismembering, obliterating, not
creating. And so you might imagine, V, why no one wants to listen to me, why no one
wants to credit me, why no one will remember me. The problem is we will never solve
our problems. We cant. We cant afford problems like that. Global warming is fine, a
war with the Arabs, who cares, no source of energy big deal. Those are problems we feel
we can solve. The problem I posed, we cannot even afford to acknowledge. It would in
effect simply tell us that we are all insane. And what would we do with that? How would
we proceed? We would be nothing but babblers, babbling nonsense which no one would
any longer wish to buy, we would stop seeking a cure for a disease we knew was
incurable, we would cease to believe in ourselves and with that we would stop seeing
others other than ourselves and with that we would stop believing anything but what
came first and foremost in our minds and with that we would have anarchy and with that
we would have chaos and with that we would have reversed millions of years of
evolutionary refinement that first brought us out of chaos and made us a successful and
enduring part of the world. Thats right.

The winds now were spasmodic

a warm rain was falling across us in angled sheets, ducking the awnings above us. I spoke
loudly right into the microphone to make sure I was heard both by him and my recorder.
Do you think you will be remembered for the good things you did or the bad things? He
laughed. Well, the world will hang you on the one mistake you made while forgetting a

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thousand good things. Thats just how it is. You know that. But I am not out for medals
or accolades, V. I didnt get any awards, never will and to tell you the truth, I could give
a fuck. Most of what I have done was in fact rather forgettable, but isnt that true for all
of science? What scientist really prides himself on what hes done? The past is a field of
mistakes and mishaps. All we can do is look back and try not to cringe. He laughs. I
mean, I look back at some of the stuff we did and I cant tell you why the fuck we did
half those things. Am I proud of what I have done? How could I be? I would be the first
to admit that for the most part all Ive done is kill a few, maim some, destroy a bunch,
remove from this world or make unviable a whole host of animals, people, lives,
relationships, students, colleagues, patients, wives, even a few sons and daughters to
throw in for good measure. Maybe I actually helped a few people, Im not sure. When I
was your age, it was different. Early on I believed that what I was doing was right, that it
was the right thing to do, the only thing to do, I was a self centered, megalomaniacal
asshole of a son of a bitch. Later in life I came to understand that no matter how hard I
tried to do the right thing, it was somehow always wrong, but I kept trying. Then I came
to accept that what I was doing was in fact wrong, yet I knew it was the right thing to do,
so again nothing would stop me. Eventually as the years creep up on you, you have to
face the realization that everything you do is wrong, will be wrong, every step you take
will be a mistake, the harder you try the worse your mistakes, the past is always a
disaster, an embarrassment, we hope to never have to look behind us, as we never seem to
learn how to avoid making mistake after mistake after mistake, and when we do look
back we will always look back and try to dissect out the small fragment, a fleck of what
we think may in some way have been right. But as time goes on, those fragments are

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harder and harder to find, those flecks begin to vanish altogether. Then you come to
realize that progress, if there is such a thing, is made by mistakes, not through
discoveries, and certainly not by discerning truths. Evolution proceeds by mistakes, by
death, not by life, the survivors are only what are left after all the dying that has taken
place, progress is the same you could say, a function of attrition, V, not growth, not even
accumulation, but attrition. If progress is anything it is the same, it is a process by which
we weed out stupidity, we hack away the brush, clear away the rubbish in the mind and
see what is left. It is not what you create or build, it is what youve got left that matters,
what you have left as you push on, that is all we do, we push on V, not necessarily
forward, not necessarily backward, only on, and we push on by destroying what we can,
all we can, and we may marvel for a while at what is left of our destruction, what
remains, what stood up and withstood our efforts, and so while I was a young student like
you I was a hurricane of destruction, nothing could stand in my way and remain intact,
and so I believed I was making progress, contributing to progress, I believed like you this
was my destiny, my part in mans destiny, yet later, looking back, I often felt shame for
being so stupid, so naive, so full of myself to believe that what I was doing would benefit
anyone, would contribute to any kind of progress, and then later I realized what a waste it
was to feel such shame, that I was doing as only I could, which was to continue on,
continue moving on, continue with my destructive path, continue cutting my swath
through time, taking with it all I could and it was only in this way could I contribute
anything at all to the world, but no one believed this but me, V, sometimes I think I am
the only one who see this and understands, all the others continue to believe in progress,
humanity is a cuckold of progress, when in fact humanity is being fucked by its own very

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idea of progress. Progress is a disease V, a disease of the human mind, it is without
doubt, a kind of insanity, because progress does not exist, it does not occur, just as there
are no human faces in clouds or tortillas, there is no progress in our efforts, we see only
what we want to see, what we want to believe, insanity is defined by doing what we
already know is wrong, useless, stupid, yet we as a race repeat our oath, repeat our
efforts, redouble our enthusiasm to carryon the progress of the world, a progress that does
not exist, that we reinvent over and over again, like the delusional nuts we are, we never
tire of the reinvention we do, we never grow suspicious of the failures, of the
embarrassments, of how we fuck things up gain and fucking again, we are a delusional
race, V, we are the most insane and dysfunctional race on earth, we destroy yet we see a
great building, we annihilate yet we see emancipation, we massacre and we see
improvement, we irradiate and we see cleansing, we paralyze and we see amelioration,
we obliterate and we see sanitation. We are a race that believes its own insanity, that has
grown and developed a culture around its insanity, that believes it is surviving when it is
only dying, that believes it is flourishing when it is only barely replicating, that believes it
is building when it is only decimating, believe it is populating when it is only suffocating.
Somewhere along the way the brain outgrew its usefulness and now I think it is taking us
down, it is ridding itself of the disaster it has created, it is eating itself alive, it has taken
charge of vanquishing its own existence, it has to, it has turned on every principle that we
hold true about self survival, it has no choice, and so I have no choice, we are all part of a
suicidal mission, V, one that will not end with our individual suicide, not only with the
suicide of our race, but with the complete and utter annihilation of our species.

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I bent over the microphone again and nearly shouted. What would you say Dr.
Ping should be most remembered for? (long pause) Hmmmm.

Another good question

(long pause) Since I first got word that Ping had died ohhhh a few months ago, I have
indulged in a good bit of reflection on the poor guy, on my life as it was with Ping, on the
many aspects of the world that the two of us touched, touched together, there were times
when you could almost see the world morph, you could feel and see the bends and turns
we were putting it through, it is a peculiar feeling to be able to change something, even
something ever so small and insignificant in the world, and I am sure Ping will be
remembered for having achieved far more than that. Sometimes I think I can still talk
with Ping, I put myself in a kind of meditative state where I can sit and visualize that he
is here with me, talking with me, and before long I will indeed get a response, something
that he might say to help me through a problem or gain a better perspective. (long pause)
I suppose we will have to wait and see, wont we V, let history be our judge, huh? Let the
others tell us what to think, what to remember, what to glorify, what to condemn. We
have no other choice, now do we? (long pause) But you came all the way down here to
hear something more than that, so let me give you something for your study V. Ping was
different, Ping knew the system, he played well within the enterprise, in fact if you were
to say one good thing about Ping it would be, he knew how to play the game, he played
well and I have to hand it to him, that was the reason for his success and his success was
not to be underestimated. But what he should be remembered for, he never will be

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remembered for. Pings most important work, and having brought this up, I am probably
the only one who ever read it, in fact Ping believed I never read his work, and to be
honest most of the time I didnt, but this one was different, it was entitled The Biology of
Error, you wont find a copy now no matter how hard you look, I had what was probably
the last one, and now that one is gone as well, but from what I understand of this work,
Pings point was that from an evolutionary perspective survival really came down to how
an organism responded to mistakes it made, not how it responded to the environment per
se, survival had less to do with the ability to respond correctly, to make the correct
decisions as it did with how it responded when we make the wrong decisions, when it is
in error. This was brilliant really. I was and still am amazed that these ideas came out of
Ping, out of careful Ping, the eye-to-the-grindstone Ping, but if you think about it, you
soon realize how Ping-ish this whole idea is. You see, Pings basic belief that allowed
him to come up with this idea was that we are all basically flawed, all organisms are
basically flawed, some more than others, the flatworm less flawed than a salamander, the
salamander less flawed than a red fox, the red fox less flawed than a monkey, everything
less flawed than the human species. In other words, every organism will make mistakes,
that making of mistakes is not because it is not smart enough, not because it needs more
training, it makes mistakes because it is in its very being to make mistakes, its entire
system is flawed, and so the survival of a creature cant be based on its ability to make
correct decisions, but must be based on how it adjusts to the mistakes that it will
invariably make. But most importantly, this ability to make mistakes increases
exponentially with the complexity of the nervous system and this was an extremely
important finding for Ping. As organisms get more complex, they become increasingly

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mistake prone, and so there had to be an evolutionary basis to mistake making as
contrasted with correct decision making which does not seem to be as important as a
survival trait. Now this is absolutely ingenious, dont you think? That is what his book,

The Biology of Error

was basically about, and the problem is no one read it, no one reviewed it, it simply
appeared and then vanished. What I think was so ingenious about Pings idea was that he
accepted a different basis than everyone else at the time. Everyone else accepted a basis
that the decision making apparatus was basically sound, with the right maturity, the right
training, the right level of exposure to the environment, a fit organism would be able to
use this apparatus to navigate its world successfully. Ping stomped on this assumption
and said what evidence do we have that the basic apparatus is even adequate, let alone a
perfect apparatus? What Ping said was if we cant find a basis to assume that the
decision making apparatus is perfect, then we can assume that is it probably imperfect,
and in fact we probably can come up with a host of evidence to show that it is not perfect
rather than find an iota of evidence to support that it is perfect. And so for some four
hundred pages that is what Ping does in The Biology of Error, he shows how the
apparatus is imperfect and he does so with such ferocity and detail that I think this is why
most people never read the book. But you get past that and you get to the very simple
sounding arguments that follow, namely, that we all make mistakes, every day, every
hour, in fact we may actually surprise ourselves when we do make the right decisions,
and that most mistakes are pretty banal and benign, if we order a pork roast instead of a

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pork rump, for example, if we make a left instead of a right, if we call someone Bob
instead of Rob. For the most part who cares? But what happens if we put on the
accelerator instead of the brake, what happens if we miss a step walking down the stairs,
what if we put poison in our soup instead of salt? It is not easy to find these kinds of
examples, but in other animals it is easier, what if you are a rabbit and you mistake an
approaching light for the sun instead of a car? What if you are a bird that fails to see the
glass window? The bottom line is, making mistakes can lead to death, adjusting to these
mistakes can avoid death. In fact Ping found a way to put a stinger into asses of all those
sociobiologists in an area that had always been vulnerable, but largely ignored what
Ping was saying was who are we to believe that what is is in any way perfect? Secretly
what I think he wanted to say was, hey, all of you who assume the organism is basically
perfect, how different are you from the intelligent creationists? I say secretly but I am not
sure Ping would have agreed with my interpretation, but I am correct none the less. Why
would the forces of natural selection catch up to the organism with an imperfect
apparatus if the organism had a better way of compensating, in other words if it had a
way to deal with bad decisions and if in fact making bad decisions followed by good
compensation for those bad decisions led to a more favored outcome? But Ping never
took this line of thought all the way to its obvious conclusion. I think he was afraid to.
Ping never asks the obvious question, which is, why do we make mistakes at all? Why
isnt the decision making apparatus perfect? If Ping had completed his line of thinking,
taken his ideas and expounded them, extrapolated those thoughts out to their natural
conclusion, I think he would have had no choice but to declare that the decision making
apparatus in any organism has to have some flaws built into it, otherwise, how would it

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come up with mechanism for dealing with a changing environment, an environment that
does not necessarily change according to natural laws, but can change and has changed
because of what man has done to it? I think it is safe to safe, he would say, that the brain
can never be a perfect mirror of the world, which is always changing, which is in many
ways bigger than the brain of any organism, and which will always create a situation that
cannot be dealt with except to make a mistake and then adjust. There will always be a
fundamental difference between the brain and the world, between the mind and the world,
and that is just built in as a biological mechanism for survival. The Biology of Error was
some six hundred pages of brilliant stuff, just brilliant, but in the end he never could get
himself to address this final conclusion to his point. Personally I think Ping did
extrapolate this out to that conclusion, at least I believe I gave him enough hints to do that
extrapolation, and what he saw was at best a dead end, not just for science but for
thinking as well, at worse it was a realization that was terrifying in a way, too terrifying
to actually contemplate. If you admit the apparatus is faulty, where does that leave the
examiner, the thinker? If we are faulty at best, what can we truly say about anything we
say? I think, and this is easy to say now, thirty years later, that he was afraid of the
consequences, and I also think, and this is even easier to say now, that those who did read
his book were also afraid of the consequences and that is why no one would admit to
reading this book, when in effect, I think everyone read this book, it may in fact have
been the most widely read book on its topic, but no one would admit to it, no one would
review it, no one even wrote to Ping and told him the book stank like shit, that was the
real hint, V, that was the real clue to me that everyone had read it, so many people would
have loved yet another excuse to send Ping a note telling him how much he stank like

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shit, and this book would have been the perfect excuse to tell him this and much more,
yet no one did, I remember those months after it was published, Ping was nearly breaking
out in hives that is how worried he was that he would soon begin to get those letters and
reviews that basically said he smelled like shit, he chewed away his fingernails, he bit his
own lips, he developed a psoriasis like condition on his eyebrows waiting for these letters
and reviews telling him he smelled like shit, but they never came, you would have
thought he would have been relieved, but who could have felt relieved when you write
what you think is the most provocative and scandalous book of your career and you sit in
your bedroom for five weeks chewing off your fingers and lips waiting for those letters
and reviews telling you you smell like shit when in effect nothing arrives somehow
insinuating that not only did no one bother to send you those letters and reviews telling
you you smell like shit but no one bothered to read the fucking book in the first place!
This was by the far the worse and most cataclysmic realization poor Ping had to face! I
remember, I was there with him. And so for six more weeks he stayed in his bedroom,
chewing on his fingers, biting his lips, picking off scabs from his face and neck, drinking
vermouth, waiting everyday for the mail to arrive, for his assistant to bring him his mail
from the university, it had gotten so bad he was embarrassed to be seen at the university,
for everyone knew that he had published his book and now everyone knew that no one
had read it, not even his friends and colleagues had read it, for surely they would have
sent some banal note of congratulations, no, not even his graduate students had read it,
those spineless obsequious students who always needed another reason to tell Ping how
ingenious he was, and so with this book they would have had another easy way to tell
him how ingenious he was, and in this case they would have been right, but no, not even

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a letter or card from a single one of his graduate students, not even the morally corrupt
pharmaceutical companies wrote him, they would have never read the book, but they
would have written him anyway. No one wrote him. I was the only one who even told
him that I had read the book, to which he merely shrugged, as I knew that my having read
the book meant nothing to him, just as it meant nothing that I sat down with him more
than a dozen times on the filthy bed in his bedroom where he sat for months and told him
how this was an amazing book, to which he barely shrugged and in fact seemed almost to
bow over in tears, I was the only one with him during this time and the only one who told
him that this book was the best book he had ever written and if he would indeed be
remembered for any one book it would certainly be this one but all of my support and
kind but true words rang upon ears deaf to anything I had to say since he was not seeking
something from me but from the world. And that never came. What always fascinated
me, V, was that Ping was, deep down, a subversive, thats right. He was, and I am not
even sure he knew this about himself. As much as it seemed he played by the rules of the
game and played only by the rules of the game, he was secretly, quietly, probably
subconsciously subverting the system. For many years, I was the only one who knew
this, I think, especially in the years of his greatest achievements, those times when the
world loved him, those times when he put out more papers and more journals, more
articles and more publications that anyone alive, and so he was a hero, for a long time I
think he moved the scientific apparatus all by himself, but quietly and as I said perhaps
even unbeknownst to himself, he was leading a subversive movement, a revolution, in his
own quiet way he was responsible for a pattern of thought that could, I believe, one day
be as disruptive as any in scientific history. And what was that? I asked him. He laughed,

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we may never know V! That this all happened shortly after Ping published The Biology
of Error is surely no coincidence. I am not sure if it stopped because Ping himself
discovered what he was doing, or if the scientific apparatus began to see what was
happening. In any case, a stop was put to Ping and what he was about to do. Pings
world nearly collapsed, his enterprise came screeching to a halt, and this was because
science had discovered that it could in fact gain activity, even double its activity by
generating activities whose sole purpose was to shut down other existing activities, and
so Ping was nearly destroyed by the sudden flurry of activity that was engendered to
destroy him and shut down his activities. And so with that, his ideas, his gains, his
subversive threats were all buried beneath the activity designed solely to destroy him.
He paused as if listening to the storm. If you asked Ping the difference between
himself and other scientists, he continued, he would tell you he was of a continental
constitution, that he was not one for the American way of academia but was a man of
European values -- which was funny, at least I thought so, yet all you have to do is look
around him and you would see that he took this idea of himself very seriously. Look at
the books in his study and there you would find only European authors, European
thinkers, European artists, except for a stray copy here and there of a work by an
American, and then it was probably on his shelves as one of those obligatory books, a
book signed for him that had to be placed upon his shelf in case that person ever came for
a visit. Go to his living room and take a look at his music collection, all German and
English, what a combination, Wagner and Brittan, hideous to my taste, but it all made
sense to Ping. His trips and vacations were always to Florence and Prague, never to
Santa Fe or Cancun. His clothes, oh Christ his clothes, the wool pants and Pendletons

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even in the summer time, the blue blazers, the turtle neck sweaters, he dressed with the
worst of the European academia who are by the way the worst dressers of them all. If
Ping was anything Ping was typical of the cultured class he came from, which is in fact to
say that he obviously thought of himself as European more than he thought of himself as
American, which was really to say that he actually could not bear to think of himself as
American, but preferred to think of himself as European, since thinking of himself as
American was to accept certain missing elements to himself that he had long thought
should not be missing, even if they were, which really is to say that he thought of himself
as bred from European stock, not having plummeted from European stock as most
Americans had, he viewed himself as raised and fed on European values, not jealous of
European values as most Americans were, he saw himself as created from and one with
European culture and tradition, not a genetic aberration of European culture and tradition
which is in fact what most Americans are. Of course, Ping is not European at all, not in
even the most basic ways, yet this did not stop him from thinking and believing and
forever assuming he was indeed European. Ping believed he was a child of the European
attitude that concepts were more important than practical solutions when in effect Ping
was all about practical solutions and nothing about concepts, in fact his entire approach to
concepts was to make them into practical solutions, whereas a European would prefer to
agonize over a concept that has no practical solution and would in fact prefer to mope for
his entire life over the failure to achieve the transition from a concept to a practical
solution. And so Ping believed that he was more European than American when in fact
Americans are not about concepts at all, and if they are they are only about concepts that
can be realized, and that indeed was what Ping was all about, his approach to any concept

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was to seek its realization, not to hold on to the concept forever as the Europeans were
wont to do. His whole approach to a concept was to figure out how to realize it, how to
create a practical solution, that was his drive, his aim, his motivating goal, and so Ping, in
this way, was more American than European. For example whereas the European, for the
most part, believes that madness is subjective, that one mans folly is another mans
fortune, that the line is indeed blurred between insanity and genius, between passion and
madness, Ping is truly American in that for him insanity is something that must be
objectified, madness was a biological state, a behavioral state, a cluster of identifiable
traits and attributes. Ping was also obsessed with activity, which again was very
American, activity it seemed to me just for activitys sake, which again is a very
American trait, movement for movements sake, a fear of nonmovement, a loathing of
standing still, as where the Europeans are a sedentary lot, a sluggish race when it comes
to movement of almost any kind, they would prefer to sit and contemplate whereas Ping
could not in any way under any circumstances sit and contemplate, for him sitting and
contemplating for the sake of sitting and contemplating was nearly impossible to achieve
let alone desirable, and so Ping, like most Americans, was nearly always engaged in some
activity even if such activity was useless and towards no end or purpose other than to be
engaged in some such activity, which again is more American than European by all
means, and this was surely one of the most defining characteristics of Ping, his ceaseless
activity, his obsession to be continually active, to be moving, to be doing, even if it was
to be doing nothing, he was continually moving forward, moving forward as if by inertia,
the actual cause, the original cause of his motion having long disappeared, yet, here is
where Ping believed he was the cause, when in effect he was caught in the current of

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inertial momentum that swept him forward, the current of motion which was in effect just
that inertia that carried him forward, the original cause long gone, long forgotten. In
some respects, Ping was moved forward by his nostalgia of what he thought he was, of
what he thought the world had been, yet in a way it could be said that Ping has forgotten
what he was nostalgic for, that he was left only with the feeling of being nostalgic, and in
some way perhaps only nostalgic for the actual feeling of being nostalgic which he had
indeed lost, and so this may indeed have been the force of the inertia that drove him
forward. In some ways you could see what he was striving for, he sought for example to
prove his strength just when he perceived his strength was waning; he sought to clarify
when he began to see that all was confusion and chaos; he sought rules, when patterns
began to vanish, when all was become so formless. Failure for Ping was not a thing that
could be achieved, it was what took place when all other activity stopped, when life
ceased. As long as there was activity there was hope, perhaps little hope for success but
still hope that failure would be avoided. And then Ping, like most Americans, while he
seeks to avoid failure at all costs actually seeks death, whereas most Europeans embrace
failure as a condition they are accustomed to and seek to escape death. Americans, like
Ping, want nothing more than to embrace death, whereas Europeans are always looking
for a way to buy themselves a few more years, to trick death, to somehow outsmart death,
as if death had this ability to forget, as if death could indeed suddenly become busy with
other things and forget and pass over some people. Americans accept and actually
welcome death, they build their homes as mausoleums waiting for death, they create their
own funerals in their tract homes, their mansions, their sterile towns, they live their life
for nothing other than that final stretch of time that will take them to death, they create

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cities on which death is the only goal, yet there is not a European who would not lie or
beg or completely embarrass himself to get himself a reprieve from death, just one more
day, a few hours even. Ping embraced the American love of death, the lure every
American has for death, Ping had this in the suburbs where he always lived, he had this in
the walls he built around himself, the homes he fortressed himself behind, the
mausoleums he created for himself both at home and at work. Ping like most Americans
cannot escape this embrace of death, no matter where they go, they will take that trait
with them, that will be the first thing they will transplant to another country, another
culture, that will be the first sign that will tell you the Americans are here. Here in the
Caribbean, the Americans build their mighty mausoleums up here upon on the cliffs,
overlooking the sea. Here the Europeans build their resorts where they frolic and screw
and engage in all kinds of social debauchery, they come here to commingle, to fornicate,
to rub up against each other, to feel skin against skin, to argue and fight, and get drunk
and make fools out of themselves, things the Americans will never do. The Americans
cloister themselves in these obscene villas, these gargantuan tombs with their thick
massive walls, hallways so long and deep they need to be lighted during the day, the
cavernous rooms that spill out into other cavernous rooms, the yards and garden areas
that look more like cemeteries, the vaulted ceilings painted with celestial symbols,
everything the sign and symbol of a tomb, everything the spit and polish of sepulcher,
there these Americans come to die, while the European come to play. Ping was never
comfortable here because he could not bear to be a single white man amidst a sea of
black people. And in this way he was not European either. The Europeans carry their
awkwardness for enslaving another race on their sleeves, you can see it when they try to

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commingle with the natives here, when they walk the streets, the unease in their faces, the
sweat under their arms. The Americans on the other hand try to hide their shame, which
is true shame, and so they come here and pretend not to notice they are suddenly amidst a
sea of black people, that pretend to ignore that they are a aberration here, they look away
and pretend not to see that these black people know only one way to react to a white
person which is to be subservient. The European experiences this subservience and tries
to put the native at ease. The American experience the subservience and pretends it is a
part of the culture, the culture here, not their culture back home, and so they act as if it is
normal and that they do not dare interfere. The Europeans when they talk about the
intelligence of a black man, they pick an African politician, a poet or an author for their
example, when an American talks about a black mans intelligence they are taking about
a shoe shine boy who reads the paper while he waits for another customer, or a maid who
knows a second language. Finally, Ping believed he was, like the European, a man of the
city, a man who lived his life in the vertical, who looked up not out and across, when in
effect Ping was more American than most Americans in that he was truly a man of the
desert, the most American of landscapes, the most American of places, and the place to
which he was finally drawn, once and for all. It is not hard to understand really, at least
not for me, why Ping left the suburbs, left the city and the universities and spent these last
years in the desert wasteland. Ping was never comfortable here on the islands, this way
station between Europe and America, even centuries later after the last voyages crossed
these ways. Then finally, Ping chose the desert, he chose the emptiness, he chose the
vague and two dimensional nothingness of the desert on which he cast out whatever
thoughts, whatever demons, whatever reservations he had, and upon this flat canvas he

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laid his own life out once and forever, in effect, he saw in the desert what so many have
seen in the desert, the taking away, the nullification, the endlessness, the endpoint, the
last word, the last wind, the last of anything. The desert, unlike the ocean here, has a
superficially neutrality, it is a challenge to meaning, a hyperspace with no origin, no
reference point, whereas the ocean teams with meaning, it is the origin, the very origin of
all and everything, and reluctant to give up any hint of its sources, its mystery. The
beauty of the desert has no meaning, it has no history, no reference point, its endless
continuity and hence its discontinuity makes it completely and absolutely, no incredibly
and beautifully inhuman, it is a beauty that cannot in fact be traced to any human feats,
cannot be owned by even the greediest of human beings, just as there is no perceptual
beginning there is no perceivable end, no end points, no points in the middle, no point to
point to, whereas the ocean smells and tastes of the very birth of life, of the elements that
give way to birth, the beauty of the ocean has meanings as infinite and multifarious as the
ages of man, it swells and moans with meaning, it slaps the earth and pummels the cliffs
with meaning, it roars at night, it moves and rises like a pregnant woman with the moons
and gravity, with the birthing of both day and night, it is a beast in and of itself with an
intelligence we never think to question, it is a leviathan that we never feel ashamed to
name or even pray to, it controls our life, it is the shaper of our world, the boundary of all
that is known, of all we know, it is as endless as it is unfathomable. It is between this
ocean and the mountains that the European thrives, between these two he builds his cities
and kingdoms, between these two he writes his history, he creates his civilizations. You
will never find the European on the desert, no, the desert belongs to the American, this is
where the American will find himself defined, but not define himself, this is where he

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will find himself understood but not understand himself. The desert and the ocean could
not be more different. Night is so entirely different on the desert compared to the sea, in
the desert the night is complete, the loss of sight is ultimately a loss of the imagination as
well, when the light vanishes, there is nothing else but darkness to imagine, the mind
itself is shut down, winds stir up from directionless origins, without references, without
endpoints, contemplation halts, even contemplation of death, the obsession of the
American and the obsession of Ping, and death here bestows death, the end becomes the
end. On the sea, night brings the imagination to life, it stirs the forces of the imagination,
it feeds upon the most base elements of the brain, there is no hope for the man left to face
the black night of the ocean, no fate can be worse as it will truly be filled with the most
monstrous and hideous of thoughts, of imaginings, of desires, of all that is most human.
The desert does not give back what it takes. The desert only takes. Rebirth is the oceans
specialty, it is the oceans being, that is its reason and its nature, whereas rebirth in the
desert is only possible if it comes in some other, other worldly form, as when night falls
and the cold descends, the silence surrounds all, the winds appear, directionless, without
original, and you feel the very sands of the earth, the earth itself, resifting, being
reshaped, being reborn, into what you dont know.
He paused again to smoke his pipe.

Ping was a vulgar man

as most Americans are, perpetually seeking to justify his own existence, yet not caring
one bit to accomplish the success of that task. He was banal at best, a simple man, simple

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in face, banal in stature, in his eyes, his mouth, he was a parody of all he assumed he was,
he was a primitive in some ways, a reduced form of human being, reduced to its basics, to
its most simple of elements for survival, and that too made him all the more American.
He had none of the complexity and none of the contradictions of the Europeans, he did
not confuse thought with thinking, he did not try to reconcile history with truth, like all
Americans, all of his traits could be reduced down to some simple things, that was
nostalgia. Whereas Europeans are almost always ready to forget their history while they
embrace it all the same, Americans continually try to recreate their history, a history that
is forgotten even before it is written, then forgotten again once it is written and so can
never truly be reconstructed. Europeans being completely and totally embarrassed of
their history, yet dependent on it for their meanings and their truths all the same, spend
their lives reconstructing and deconstructing their history, whereas Americans have to
borrow a beginning, a point of reference from either history books, or from the
imagination to even start on some historical project of any sort. History for the
Europeans is an image that they have to destroy and obliterate. For Ping, like all
Americans, history was something to be created, to be realized, history was a thing that
began as an idea and was realized as a history. For the Europeans, history was all too real
and had to be destroyed by tearing it into concepts, obliterating it into ideas, shredding it
into topics, and in this way Ping was not European, no not at all. He even wrote a book,
Genetics and the New Europe, I believe it was called, which would cement his fate as the
most American of all Americans who ever ventured to write a book on Europe. And yet
Ping was one thing that the Europeans are not, and that was a true scientist. European
scientists are not true scientists just as European philosophers are not true philosophers,

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which is to say they are thinkers not scientists and observers not philosophers. The
European scientist cannot wade his way past the concepts and theories that consume him,
forever compelled to make the real world into a world of ideas, just as the European
philosopher cannot win this battle with concepts unless he has pulled those concepts from
the real world, from the data and the simulacra he sees around him, the flighty and airy
concepts of the American philosophers are of no import or substance. I guess you could
say if Ping had one fault it was a very human fault, very human indeed. Ping walked
around like most of us with several theories in his head, he carried them around like we
all do as if they each contained a bit of the final answer, when in fact, if he had taken
some time as none of us ever do he would have discovered that many of these theories
did not fit together at all. He would have been forced to resolve the conflicts. But like
most of us Ping was not a man to take that time, he was a man of little reflection. Data
and clusters were not attempts to answer these questions, they were simply activities. In
fact, they were perfect activities for Ping because they were endless activities, and
endless activities require endless energy. Ping was a man of endless, boundless energy
but little reflection. But like I said, this is a human condition not the fault of one man. In
fact, if Ping should be remembered for anything, I think he should be remembered as
perhaps more human than the rest of us.
Finishing that sentence I noticed his face had adopted a wild and desperate look,
his long hair wet and hanging about his face, his mouth open, his lips purple, his eyes
looking at me with an unanswered question. I wasnt sure if I could continue, but I had to
get to the questions I had come here to ask. Against the cacophony of the growing storm,

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I was shouting now

Some people think you killed Ping. Could that be true? He laughed. (Long pause) I am
sure someone does. Why not? If someone would have killed Ping it would have been me
right? I dont know. I dont know what or who killed M (long pause) I hadnt talked
with Ping, except for this last conversation we had about you, which is to say we hadnt
talked for almost ten years. And then before that our conversations were rare. Yet I am
amazed at how alone I felt when I heard about his death. Like something had been
yanked from me, torn right out of me. I realized that I knew he was in trouble. I know
that I could have probably helped him, but what did I do? Nothing. I have thought a lot
about that. Why I did nothing. Not without obvious psychological interpretations, I was
reminded of an experiment Ping and I did a long time ago, we were asked to test a drug
called Zipermine, or Zippermin, it was used for treating boils, a specific kind of boil, but
someone thought it could also be a new treatment for depression, or maybe for rage, I
dont really remember. The makers of this drug asked us to do some work for them. So I
tested this drug on some monkeys, looking for some neurobiochemical behavioral
correlates for this drug, didnt find much I dont think, Ping said it was useless. Told the
pharmaceutical company that there was no effect, nothing we could vouch for. About six
months later, this Zipermine appears on the market, the newly recommended treatment
for depression. Recommended based on our results! He laughs. I had to laugh really. I
never even took any notes on those experiments. Just met with some guys for a few
drinks, told them the bad news and off they went. Well the next year, I came back down

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as usual to escape the winter in Canada and lo and behold, several of the female monkeys
that were administered this antidepressant had conjoined twins when they gave birth.
About three or four of them I think. Darndest thing you ever saw. Told the drug
company about this and I think it only took them two years to take the drug of the market.
If I hadnt threatened them and made a fuss I am not sure they would have done a thing
about it. Back here, only one set of twins survived, and no one had the heart to do
anything so we kept those twins in a special pen, they pretty much became the favorites
around here. But, and of no surprise really, after a while one of the twins died. We didnt
know what to do. Couldnt surgically separate the dead twin from the live one without
killing the live one. No one had the heart, or stomach I should say, to euthanize the live
twin and so the monkey continued on, carrying around the dead twin, for days, weeks,
then months. The hair and skin began to fall off the dead twin, the arms became nothing
but boney appendages, it was horrible really. But the strangest thing was that the live
twin never seemed to ever recognize that its other half was dead, it would groom the
corpse, lick it, curl up with it at night, attack you if you tried to touch the dead one. Until
it died it never exhibited a single sign that it knew the other twin was dead (long
pause) The point V? I guess sometimes as a doctor, the cruelest, hardest thing you have
to do is to do nothing. Even if you think you have alternatives, even if you have options,
the hardest choice is to do nothing. Sometimes, you can kill someone by doing nothing.
The thing is, you rarely get persecuted for doing nothing. I probably think at many times
in his life I could have helped Ping, could have helped him through his conflicts. But for
the most part, what did I do? Nothing, I really did nothing. I dont know what killed
Ping. Or who. I cant imagine someone would even think of such a thing.

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The winds beat at anything that is loose

the shutters, paintings, table cloths, fallen palm fronds. I am tempted to turn off the
recorder with the idea to continue tomorrow, as chaos seems to be erupting all around us
and I am not sure if what I am recording is audible. But he shows no signs of being
bothered by the wind or noise, he barely notices the shutters slamming, the trees shaking
madly, the dark shadows that fly across the sky above us like birds, but are pieces of
debris.
It doesnt matter really, V, if we have no way of knowing or if we will ever know
what the nature of this brain function is, all we need to know is where we need to start, it
doesnt matter, even if by starting anew, starting all over again, we must once again
remind ourselves of how stupid we are, how stupid we were, for that is undoubtedly how
we will feel, like idiots, stupid fucking idiots, once again. And what we will learn from
this is that we have to unlearn what we had learned and begin to learn again, we will have
to face the fact that what we felt was not some of our .actually had a truth to them we
now must embrace however clammy that embrace may feel., we need to enter the trance,
we need to shove consciousness into a state, we need to sever the old connections and
make room for the new, we need to unlearn so we can relearn, or else accept the pending
doom of our own insanity. I contributed the idea that unreliable units create the most
reliable systems. That contribution changed the world. Yet our students cannot grasp
this. Our students race through knowledge as if it were purely a set of encyclopedias,
impatient they are to get to the end so they can add their own meaningless articles to the

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stack, never questioning what they have learned, never wondering only seeking to add to
the forever growing stacks of crap our knowledge has become. Universalization, V, has
since the worm been our method of learning, now it is the method of our unlearning, as a
biological principle, it no longer has a role other than to reduce us to mindless bits of
flesh that make up our mind. The Web has the capacity of reducing each of us thinking
beings to the role of a neuron, each of us devoid of any real meaning except how we
participate in a group, in a mass, like some animals eat their brains when they no longer
need a certain level of intelligence, we will become little automatons, spermatic wrigglers
in a ganglia of others, sparking some meaning in the substrate of the Web but not in the
mind of the individual. That is my fear, if I had one, V. The artist, V, is the only one who
is true to the nature of self consciousness, the good artist paints or composes with his ego
sitting outside the process, the good artist trains himself to keep his ego out. To create not
so much from the subconscious but to consciously create without the self-conscious. This
used to be called the muse or the creative spirit or what we often call the insanity of
creation, believing that something could in fact come out of nowhere, be produced out of
nothing, when in fact, the trained artist, the self trained artist, is the one who uses most of
his abilities, the most of his faculties, because what is the self-conscious but a voyeur that
inhibits, confuses, and befuddles the mind? And so how often do we hear the great artist
say, I dont know? You have asked me why I am here, assuming that I am here because I
have no place else to go, when in fact nothing could be further from the truth, there are
few places on this earth where you are nearly drowned in the number of confluences you
find here, confluences of human existence, of nature, of history, of race, of earths forces,
of coincidence, of time. The lava and steam, the warm waters and cooling rain, the

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volcanic slopes and the lazy littorals of sugar cane, the currents that curl warmly against
the southern shores and the cold waters that drape from the north, the black sands on the
east and the pink and white beaches on the west, the soft smooth mangoes and the spiny
sugar apples, the bright orange frangipanis and the dullgreen sea grapes, the banana trees
and the prehistoric ferns, the screech of the mongoose and the sigh of sea turtles, yolk
stained sand prints are all that is left of the violent struggles between Indians and
Spaniards, the monkeys and parrots adding animal spirits to the trees, the shanties and the
plantation homes, the barrel chested slave boys after a day of cutting cane and the white
girls in their school uniforms skipping along the tarblack road, the kings of Africa and the
Queens of England, the rums and whiskeys, the cigars and ganja, the Rastafarian and the
Baptist ministers, the boiling pots of grease for chicken backs and the kitchens of the
French restaurants, the shadows of Joseph Conrad and the blacker silhouette of a lover
who waited years for him to return, the sperm of Alexander Hamilton and the blood of
some black chambermaid, the diary of a ministers little girl and the magical legs of a boy
from the shanty town of Molyneaux, the royal black sea urchins and the white skulls of
dead coral, the blood paintings of the Caribes who spent their last days in a cave and the
batiks of a white spinster woman who lived her last shriveled years in a windmill. This
here is the opposite of America and it is nothing like Europe, yet it is here that both come
together, that both will find their meanings, America of its origins and Europe of its
deathknell days, this is where socialism breeds like anger and capitalism strikes like a
new syphilis, where poverty and affluence commingle like saliva in a drunken kiss
between master and slave, this is where a sea separates hope from all dreams, where
hurricanes flatten any chance of escape, where alcohol turns men into boys and makes

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mothers out of grandmothers, where the fastest feet in the world, the strongest arms, the
swiftest gaits, the brightest minds, the hungriest souls are all drowned by a multitude of
forces: first the storm and then the heat and then the cane fields and then the sugar cane
sprits and then the dark waters no one can swim and then the rumbling mountains
shedding their constipated loads and then the blight of indifference and then the polio of
nohope, the maladies that come with time with waiting with not knowing with never
knowing with no longer wondering with no longer caring with not even remembering. I
am here V because there is no where else to be and be witness to this apoplexy of
mankind, of deeds, or horror, of love, of all that is so ridiculously terrible about man and
all that is sublimely fucking beautiful about man, it is here that I can see the brain V, it is
here that I manage some hope that with all we dont know and never will know there will
come a time when someone and that may not be me but someone will put all these piece
together or maybe see something despite all these pieces getting in the way and deliver
onto us what we have long been waiting to hear, V, someday that person will arrive and
he will tell me once and for all how wrong I have been and how erring I have been every
single time, and I will gladly let him have his rightful dues, and

I will applaud him

Suddenly the winds died down, as darkness enveloped us, cut us off from the staff that
clearly wanted to find the strength to interrupt this man and move us inside. With the
newfound calm, he continued talking. Of all the times I remember about Ping, there is
one in particular that stands out. It was here of course, on one of his infrequent visits to

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this island, he really didnt like coming here at all, had to drag him down here, in this
case bribe him to come here. I told him that I had created a primate model of a human
trance, one that would allow us to study what happened when the brain enters a new state
and perhaps with this we could actually see the mechanisms I thought were underlying
the whole process of unlearning. Ping thought this was bullshit. He told me so. Youve
just gone back to your mind control days, he said, your stupid thought control
experiments, and let me guess, he said, you induced these trances with lysergic acid, he
said, what a surprise Ingersott, he said, you can do better than that he said, you dont
always have to do the same thing with the same stuff over and our again he said, try
something new once in a while, there are new ideas out there, Leary was wrong, you
were wrong, why cant you just move on he said. But I insisted he come down here
anyway. This was the time, if I remember it correctly, that Ping was all hot and bothered
about sociobiological theories of human behavior. It was at this time, yes I think I am
remembering correctly, that there was great discussion about the genetic basis to
behavior, about the selfish gene being the unit of study. This of course fit in extremely
well, nice and neatly with Pings desire to have truth reduced to data. He had data and
they had the gene, so each respectively had the smallest, most basic component
respectively and that would be the beginning, that would be the starting place to explain
well everything. I of course tried to warn him that there was a problem with this
approach, that perhaps there were factors that could not be ignored which had nothing to
do with genes or data, but he wanted nothing to hear of it. Ping was like that, he always
had the spirit of a college kid, always grabbed onto a new idea like a kid grabs onto a new
girlfriend, a new love of his life, fierce in his determination to believe, even fiercer in his

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determination to defend. There was nothing you could do with people like this and if I
did not love Ping, I would have quickly come to despise him. In any case, for reasons I
dont understand he actually accepts my invitation to come down here, I think he was
having problems at home, who knows. So here we were. He clearly had no interest in
what I was doing, he simply needed someone to talk to. So I just let him talk, I knew at
some point he would either let me have a few words to say or he would talk himself into
a corner and need my help to get out (long pause) Anyway, during this conversation,
the darndest thing happened. Ping was espousing about genes and how if he could only
grab on to these genes, hold them in his hand, he would soon have the answer to
everything we needed to know. Something like that. Ping had this need to be able to hold
things in his hands. Until he could hold things in his hands they werent real to him. He
laughs. So I remember he was holding up his hand like this, as if he were grabbing a
snake by its neck when all of a sudden the longest, fattest, ugliest centipede I have seen in
my life falls from the rafters above Ping, lands on his head, and before I could warn him
this thing snakes down behind his ear and bites him, right there. Ping let out a scream
and leaped five feet into the air. It took several whacks with his hand but he finally
dislodged this monster from his head and the beast went scurrying across the wooden
floor with a noise I couldnt make in my boots! I dont ever remember seeing a centipede
act with such intention. As if it had leaped onto Ping with the intention to bite him. In
any case, the bite began to immediately swell and I was of course worried what the
outcome might be as I had seen quite a number of these centipede bites here and not a
one of them was pretty to see. Not knowing what else to do, we put some baking soda on
it to draw out the poison and I told Ping to lie down and rest. Well, it wasnt but a few

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hours later when I went in to check on Ping that to my horror discovered his entire head
had swollen to almost twice its size. Like I said, I had seen centipede bites before but had
never thought to ask one of the locals what you do when you get bit by a centipede and so
I decided the best thing for us to do was to go immediately to the local shop where
someone would surely know what to do. Unfortunately for us, we picked an afternoon
when the anti-men from another town had appeared at the nearest shop to challenge the
anti-men of this town to a verbal duel, as they were apt to do in those days, the days
before television came to the island. When we got there, the anti-men were there in full
color, dressed in womens clothes, arguing, shouting, strutting, gesticulating, while the
crowd cheered them on with laughter and boos, and so no one wants to pay any attention
to Ping and his swollen head, not with the anti-men going at it, toe to toe, nose to nose,
fake boob to fake boob. And so we traveled down the road to another shop that was not
overtaken by the crowd watching the anti-men, there we met the shopkeep and when the
shopkeep saw Pings giant head all she said was Oh My! Me got nuttin to tek any care a
dat, she said, dat be a might big head him got on dere, him need mo help dan me can
even imagine. And so with that, she pointed us in the direction of the fishermen, who
were so far away on the black sand beaches far below the shop in the village, they looked
like little fleas hopping about on the sand, and so we took off to meet the

Fishermen on the beach

It took us several hours to get all the way down the cliff until we could finally see that the
fisherman were not sand fleas at all, but men with coats of sea salt across their black skin

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like flea backs and rope knot muscles in their flea like arms and legs that only made them
look like fleas. Even before we got half way across the beach towards them it was clear
that they had spotted Ping running towards them with his growing head and they started
to haul up their nets even faster as if they were afraid of what they saw. And so the faster
they hauled up their nets the faster we ran across the sand not wanting to miss our chance
to find a cure for Pings growing head, and the faster we ran the faster they hauled their
nets, and so the faster we went the faster they went until they were going so fast we could
barely see what they were doing which was of course hauling up their nets into their
boats and I am sure they could hardly see what we were doing which was running
towards them except I am sure they could see Pings growing head no matter how fast we
ran, and so that made them move all the faster hauling up their nets, but in the end, we
moved faster in time than they hauled in time and so we reached them before they had
hauled in all their nets which would have meant they could have pushed out to sea and
left us with no remedy for Pings growing head. Except when we got there we of both
parties were so out of breath that we could do nothing but bend over huffing and puffing
then stand up as if to say something and then bend back over again huffing and puffing
while the other party stood up as if to say something, but only bent over again to huff and
puff while the other party then stood up to say something but it too bent over huffing and
puffing while the other party stood up and began to say something, but only bent over
again to huff and puff and so we did this for several minutes, this standing then bending
over in huffing and puffing repeating itself for a while until finally we caught up with
each of our breaths and the sweat again dried on the fishermans backs and the salt which
had disappeared in the sweat from all the hauling and huffing and puffing finally returned

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with its white crustiness and we had our breath and were able to tell them why we had
run down here to see them. Yes, they had indeed seen Pings head as he had come
running down toward them and in fact they had been desperately hauling in their nets as
they were afraid Ping was a dissatisfied customer who had eaten one of their fishes only
to discover it was poisonous as there is a fish to be found here that if eaten improperly
will inject a poison into the eater and cause his head to swell not unlike this. Although
they admitted they had never seen a swollen head quite as swollen as this one and so
were even more worried and wanting to get their nets hauled in so they could escape
because this looked like a really bad case of this special fish poisoning. Alas, they had a
cure, but it was only for the case of this special fish poisoning and not for a centipede
poisoning, and they did not recommend taking the special fish poisoning medicine for
anything other than special fish poisoning and certainly not for centipede poisoning as the
results could be disastrous if not horrible. I persuaded them to give me the special fish
poisoning medicine, just in case I ate some poisonous fish, I said to them commandingly,
and so they gave it to me but not before they said one more time not to give it to a man
with centipede poisoning as this was only a medicine for special fish poisoning and not
centipede poisoning and who knows what horrible thing might happen. We said good
bye to our fishermen and began heading down the beach, which was not so easy to do
now as Pings head had grown quite large and so its natural inclination was to roll with
the sand dunes down towards the ocean and it was all I could do to keep Ping upright
against this natural inclination to roll down the dunes until finally I was so exhausted
fighting this natural inclination that I told Ping to take the special fish poisoning medicine
as we had no other choice. Ping did not want to take the special fish poisoning medicine

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having listened very carefully to the fisherman who told us not once but twice not to take
the special fish poisoning medicine for a centipede poisoning as the results could be
ghastly, but I said to Ping, they did not tell us three times which means they are just being
careful as all fishermen must be, they have to be careful since so many of their customers
do eat poisons and do get sick and so it is in their nature to caution you against anything,
they will caution you once against something that means nothing, nothing at all, such as
dont wear white socks to a funeral, and they will caution you twice against something
that may have some merit but not real import, such as dont get drunk before a funeral
only after a funeral or something like do not take the special fish poisoning medicine for
a centipede poisoning, but if they had told us three times, as they would for something
like: do not put you hand in a live shark's mouth and which they did not say for taking
special fish poisoning medicine for centipede poisoning, then you would have had reason
to be cautious. In this case, Ping, you need help, I cannot keep your head from rolling
with its natural inclination down these sand dunes into the sea, and so we must do
something as it is getting dark. Ping still did not want to take the special fish medicine as
he said the fisherman were very convincing and had we stayed a wee bit longer with them
they would have clearly told us a third time not to take the special fish poisoning
medicine for centipede poisoning but we indeed left before they could tell us a third time
and so what ensued was a bit of a violent struggle as I tried to fight with him to pour the
special fish poisoning medicine down his gullet which by now had swollen up into a huge
orifice from which the winds of his breath were like gales, and luckily his head was now
so big that he could not reach me with his arms and hands and so all I had to fight was the
gales of his breath which I was sure I could maneuver, the gales of his breath along with

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his arms and hands would have been too much for me, but the gales of his breath alone
were not too much and so I was indeed able to open the medicine and find the right exact
time between the gales of his breath to pour the special fish poisoning medicine down his
extremely large and now very grotesque gullet where I watched it gurgle and roil and
eventually seep into his throat. Ping was none too pleased, but it seemed almost
immediate that a positive effect was taking place. It is working Ping! I shouted although
I could now see nothing definite taking place, only sensing a positive reaction. It is not
working! Ping shouted back through his gaping gullet, you have probably killed me, why
didnt you listen to the fisherman, in but three more seconds they would have told us as
third time, do not --- and at that moment, I could now definitely see a huge upwelling in
Pings body, one that was so large it made him gasp for breath and stop midsentence. His
body welled up as if it were trying to get up on its own, as if it where making plans on its
own to go somewhere and it was this that Ping was undoubtedly feeling as his eyes darted
back and forth anxiously wondering what was about to happen, when finally his body
could swell no more and as if giving birth, Ping let forth an issuance from his anus that
blew a huge buttwind hole in the sand. Immediately thereafter, his body began to bellow
up again, and then again he blew another buttwind hole in the sand with another ghastly
burst of flatulence. The cycle seemed doomed to repeat over and over gain, the swelling
and the blasting of flatulence, and so I shouted, relax your anus, Ping, you are bucking up
against the gas, you need to let it out gradually, over time, and so with some effort and a
few squeaks and hisses Ping learned how to relax his anus and with that we were able to
get up and begin walking again, moving forward with a gentler trail of flatulence behind
us but moving all the same. The fisherman had told us to go see a juju lady in the

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rainforest, that the juju lady would have the medicine we needed and so we made our
way there but not until we came to a pass that dipped under a suspended railroad track.
There in the pass,

sitting in the growing darkness

was a small child who looked at us and said, you can no go tru dere mon, him head too
big mon. I said this man is sick, young child, we need to take him to get some medicine.
And with that, the small child grabbed a mongoose from a cage, lit a firebrand and stuck
it up the mongooses butt. The mongoose shrieked and ran through the forest like a small
ball of fire. No him can no go dere, the small boy said, he head it too big so. But you
dont understand, I pleaded, we need to take this man to get medicine so that we can fix
his head. With that, the boy grabbed a small lamb and wrapped the lamb in oil paper, lit
the oiled paper and let the lamb go screaming like a large ball of fire into the cane field
above. Me say, me tell you dat he no can go up dere, he head done grow way too big
already. And with that he reached behind him and grabbed a cat which he was about to
coat with kerosene when Ping who had been holding back his flatulence let go as he
could hold it back any more and the blast roared past me until it reached the young kid
who had just lit his match and with that a huge ball of fire coursed its way up and over
the train tracks so bright we had to turn our heads away and when we looked back again
the young kid was nowhere to be seen. Lets go, I said and I pushed Ping up the hill
ahead of me, literally. At the top of the hill we realized we did not know which way to go

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from here as all ways seemed possible. We looked back down at the fishermen who had
sent us here, but they were back to being small, insignificant fleas on the black sands of
the beach and so even if they were hinting at a direction for us it was nothing we could
understand. Fortunately for us a car was coming down the road on which we stood and
as it grew closer we could see that it was a large black Rolls Royce, a car that one would
never expect to see here on a road that rimmed the islands lonely littoral. The car
stopped and the driver was a man with a head that had some size of its own, but what
made him different from Ping was that while his head was huge it was indeed
proportionate to his body which was huger still. As if knowing we were asking for help,
he rolled down his window and shouted for us to get in. This man it seems was the
general manager for one of the sugar cane plantations in the area, and so a man of not
only great size and proportion but importance and standing as well. He wore a fine silk
suit and a pair of black leather cowboy boots. He drove without a single concern for
anyone or anything on the road and more than once I was sure we had run over a farmer
or a small child. I see your friend is in need of some help, the sugarcane plantation
manager said. We will go to my home and see what we can do. We drove on for a few
more miles, possibly hitting and running over several more people, chickens, lambs and
even a parade of people carrying a casket, until we turned off the road that rimmed the
lonely littoral and drove up a dirt road lined with tall royal palms. Seeing me strain to
look up to the tops of the high royal palms, the sugar cane plantation manager said, the
people here think those trees so high the moon could touch them. We arrived at his home
which was a large renovated plantation home. Half buried in the grass were several old
iron cannons pointing in various poses towards the sky. I have more cannons than any

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other man I know, the sugar cane plantation manager told us. Inside his home were even
more cannons, cannons that made up the stairways, cannons that were used for book
cases, cannons that were placed here and there throughout the expansive living room. Sit
down my friends and I will be right back, said the sugar cane plantation manager, Melissa
will bring you some jelly. The sugar cane plantation manager left and soon there
appeared a small black woman in a maids outfit who brought us each a jelly which had
been neatly topped and a straw inserted into the hole. She handed me my jelly but when
she saw the obscenity that was Ping, she nearly fainted and I had to grab her tray to keep
Pings jelly from falling to the ground. Right then the sugar cane plantation manager
returned to the room, he had removed his silk suit and now wore a long black silk robe,
he still had his cowboy boots on, but most notable was the gargantuan protrusion below
his belt. Ping too noticed this and was looking at me wild-eyed, as wild eyed as he could
beyond the wild look he already displayed with his swollen head which still had not
stopped growing. The sugarcane plantation manager stood in front of Ping and kind of
hooked his big thumbs in the silk belt on his silk road endangering us both with the
possibility that that robe would burst open in front of us and in front of Ping in particular
unleashing the cause of that terrible protrusion. This big headed syndrome is probably
the worst I have ever seen, the sugar cane plantation manager said, in the old days when
big headed syndrome struck a person that person could have been subject to any one of a
variety of procedures none of which would please you. I remember my grandmother, for
she was an expert in the big headed syndrome, she would sit for hours and tell us the
many manners and treatments they could do and would have done for anyone who came
down with big headed syndrome, things like piercing the skull with railroad spikes,

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things like wrapping the head in pigs guts and boiling the head in lamb blood, things like
cutting the head off from the neck with a machete, all of which did nothing to cure the big
headed syndrome but was sufficient to get rid of the problem in another way. I have
since seen the big headed syndrome treated in other ways, such as with ice and mint
compresses, but I never seen anything that works, that is except for the only thing that
does indeed work, which is to take the head of the person with big headed syndrome and
apply sufficient and adequate pressure with the hands until it pops like a ripe fruit. The
sugar cane plantation manager then unhooked his thumbs from the silk belt holding
together his silk robe which in one way eliminated the danger of that robe bursting open
upon us and letting loose the cause of that horrible protrusion, but his unhooking his
thumbs in another way introduced another danger which was the prospect that now
seemed the intent of this giant man making as to reach out and

squeeze Pings poor swollen head

until it popped like a zit, which indeed the sugar cane plantation manager was about to do
when suddenly Ping turned around just as the most terrible fart ever unleashed by man
erupted from Pings anus, the product of holding in that horrible flatulence ever since we
got in the sugar cane plantation managers car and that burst of buttwind not only blew
open the sugar cane plantation managers robe but sent him back and falling against a
canon, which in turn then fell beneath him and set about the most unbelievable series of

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falling cannon events, all around the room the cannons fell, the books came tumbling
down, the sofas and chairs were crushed to splinter, the floors bounced and cracked and
bowed and the giant now naked sugar cane plantation manager was rolled into the center
of the bowing floor and the cannons too rolled and met him there and all came together in
a pile that neither Ping nor I could bear to face and so we ran from the house and as fast
we could down one of the dirt cane roads. As we ran we looked behind us to see the
small maid running after us and as Pings head had by now grown hideously large and so
impeded our abilities, she soon was running beside us but contrary to our fear that she
was trying to catch us she was actually running away herself. But can you tell us, Ma'am,
I yelled as she passed us, can you point us in the direction of the juju ladys shanty? With
that she stretched out her arm and at the end of that arm was a single finger that was as
straight as the expression on her face which told us to go in that direction, the direction
being that of her finger. And so we did. By the time we reached the shanty to the juju
lady, night had fallen and all around us the sounds of locusts and frogs followed our steps
like shadows. We reached the steps to her shanty and were disappointed to see no lights
on inside. I called out for the juju lady and was not surprised that there was no answer. I
looked around at the other shanties in the areas and saw that they too were all shuttered
and closed, as if shut against the night already. We were about to walk away as the
mosquitoes in this area were thick and very large, biting our faces, our hands, even
managing to get through the cloth of our shirts and pants, when the door to the juju ladys
shanty opened and there appeared a black face in a black opening on a black night. What
you be? She called out. I introduced myself and my unfortunate colleague to the juju
lady and then told her that Ping had had the misfortune to have been bitten by a centipede

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and that his head was swelling dangerously and the fishermen had told us that we could
not treat this with special fish poisoning medicine but needed a different special medicine
that you could help us with, and then at that moment, Ping expelled a huge fart which
vanished into the cane field like an escaping animal, and which caused the juju lady to
cry out, what be that? Well, I started to say, I did not listen to the fisherman who told us
twice, not three times, to not give him the special fish poisoning medicine and I gave it to
him anyway and so now his head is swollen and he is dangerously flatulent as well. Me
see dat, the juju lady said still hanging half out here doorway like some black apparition
in a black painting against a black universe. Can you help us? I asked her. Definitely,
she said, but me need some tings dat me dont have. You must go get dem for me. I
would be glad to, I said, as I was now genuinely concerned about Ping, whose head had
grown so large it seemed impossible that he could move let alone walk back to town.
The juju lady went inside her shanty and came back out with a candle in one hand, a
piece of paper in another hand. She handed me the piece of paper and held up the candle
so I could see. Me need dese tings, she said as Ping let off another roaring fart, and you
must be fast, she added, me got to treat dem he symptoms both, de swelling of he head
and de swelling of he bowels, and so me need you to find me sister who was a juju too
and she will give you these. What do you mean was a juju? I asked. She be a juju, but
she be dead, the juju lady said, but you gone find her still down near the caves where her
keep looking for dat ring she done lost many years ago right before she die, her not gone
to give you dese things until you give she dis, and with that the juju lady held out her
hand and gave me her sisters ring. Me hid dis from her cuz her a nasty bitch but to tell
you de truth I be sick a her and doan care her go now. So you ask her for dese tings and

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when her say no den you show her da ring and her den give dem all to you, ok? Ok, I
said and took off towards the caves. When I got to the caves I found the juju sister, she
was black like her sister,

a black shade in the black shadows

of an even blacker orifice in the earth, but there were several areas of her body that were
green and white with rot, like you would imagine a dead person would be. The stench
near the caves was terrible and it was all I could do to call her name and reach out my
hand with the piece of paper her sister had prepared. No, the juju sister said, me not give
you a ting. The stench was so terrible I could not utter a word, I just held out my other
hand and showed her the ring. She grabbed the ring with a violent swipe oh her crooked
hand. Ah ha! she hissed. Her been hiding dis from me all dis time huh? Ha! Me know so!
Me know so! And with that she started to laugh so loud that the laughter rolled up and
then fell back into this cavern like so many heavy rocks. Me give you what you want but
tell me sister me still cannot find me necklace. I grabbed the small bag she proffered and
turned and ran, not out of fright of the juju sister but because I had not been able to breath
the entire time I was in front of the cave, that is how thick and how foul the stench was.
Along the way I met a cow, who told me she was the juju sister and could I give her what
she wanted. I met a black bird who called out in the darkness that she was the juju sister
and could I give her what she wanted, I met a rat, I met a monkey and I met an old man
who was wearing what looked like a loin cloth from which tumbled and dragged his
intestines on to the muddy ground, as he walked the intestines made a scathing sound that

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I found particularly discomforting. He too told me he was the juju sister and could I give
him what he wanted. But I finally made it back to the juju ladys shanty and neither she
nor Ping were anywhere to be found. It was then I looked through a crack in her shutter
and saw in the inside candlelight Ping laying on the floor, his head too large to make it
through the small door, yet there he was, laying down, his eyes closed, his awful caw
heaving and blathering, while the shadow of the juju lady jittered on the wall behind him.
Suddenly the door opened in front of me and she reached out her hand. Did you get it!
She screeched. I held out the small bag which she snatched from my hand, then she
closed the door and began to sing. I sat down cursing that I was missing a bit of
extraordinary anthropology but must have quickly been overcome with exhaustion as the
next thing I knew I was waking up to find Ping and I laying on the rim of the islands
tallest volcano. Pings head was in my lap, and it was perfectly normal in size. I woke
him up as he was shivering in my lap because it was freezing cold on top of this
mountain. I also realized that maybe the sulfur from the volcano had cured him, however
we got here, unable to remember clearly the night with the juju lady and the juju sister.
And I also quickly realized that we had a long walk back down to the city, it would be
hours, perhaps a day or more. It was beautiful here, more beautiful than I had ever
imagined. I asked Ping if he would like to stay, but he looked at me as if I was nuts and
said he had seen one crater too many in his life, they all look the same after a while. Ping
said something to me, something which I remembered had been a saying of mine some
while back or at least a saying that I would have liked to think was mine, Ping said, take a
moment when you come across one of those rare moments of lucidity. And this is where
we awoke, without cognizance of how we could have alighted atop the tallest peak on the

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island, both of us sitting there on the edge of a crater looking down in to the mouth of the
dormant volcano, sitting here atop what none other than Columbus has seen as the
headless shoulders of St. Christopher, here we were atop those shoulders of the massive
saint who carried us now on his journey across the oceans. Here we sat in marvel at the
beauty and the terribleness of such a thing, the beauty a kind of blanket across the
terribleness that must have been to carry us here, to leave us here, when suddenly out of
the bush what appears but a baby,

a naked bush baby appears

a naked bush baby that was crawling through the bush, crying like a lost lamb, sometimes
like a child, we must go, I said to Ping, alarmed as I was at the bush baby which while
nothing was terrible about the naked bushbaby itself, the baby itself was so terrible as to
frighten me beyond whatever I had known. No, shouted Ping, we much not leave until
we sacrifice the naked bush baby, Ping said, and off he went to search for the bush baby
in the mountain bush. Despite the terribleness and fear I felt instantly and constantly
from the bush baby I followed Ping into the mountain bush, and I followed him and the
terrible bush baby as best I could but unlike Ping I did not have the desire to sacrifice the
bush baby as he had the so desire and so I could not manage the strength to maneuver the
mountain bush with its many obstacles, its vines and mud and deep crevices, only a man
obsessed with sacrificing the bush bay could ever manage to maneuver this mountain
bush and so with no strength to follow Pings obsessed desire to sacrifice the bush baby it

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wasnt long until I no longer heard the terrible cries of the bush baby and no longer could
hear the crashing pursuit of Pings megalomaniac obsession to catch and sacrifice the
bush baby and then it was not longer still until I could see the bush baby rising then
vanishing in the mountain bush on the other side of the crater like a small seal playing in
the undulation of the sea except it was the mountain trees and not the sea, and not far
behind the larger and darker pursuit of appearing and vanishing into those same waves
which were not the sea but the mountain trees on the other far side of the crater, until they
both vanished from sight altogether. I stopped and knew I had exactly enough time to
make it down to the bottom of the mountain and from there to find my way across the
plantations at the bottom of the mountains and from their to find a road that would take
me to the main road to the island and from there I could find a way back home and so I
had no choice but to leave Ping to see the bush baby for his sacrifice, not knowing if Ping
would ever return, but not so worried about that as worried about the darkness about the
possibility that they were possibly making their way around the crater again and soon, all
too soon, I would be faced with the horrifying sight of that bush baby once again, this
time coming at me, screaming and crying from the pursuit of the obsessed Ping and this
sight I could not allow to be seen by myself and so I quickly began my descent, and so I
began to climb down when suddenly I stepped upon a wet stone and fell and so from that
point I slipped and slid down the mountain side, slipping and sliding past the monkeys
who threw their shit in my direction, past the thorny leaves of the ferns that tried to stop
my slipping and sliding but to no avail, until still slipping and sliding I then came to a
fallen tree across my path and from that point on I was sent tumbling shoulder over foot
down the mountainside, a giant ball of man that tumbled and crashed against all that I

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encountered on the steep mountain slope, that collected up the things it crashed against
and smashed at it tumbled, the twigs and stones, and puddles of mud so that I began to
grow as I tumbled on down the mountain slope, I grew larger and larger by collecting up
the things I tumbled into on my way down and so I now tumbled past farmers who swat
at me with their hoes as if they were playing cricket, past donkeys that kicked at me with
their hooves and bit at me with buck teeth, but I just tumbled right past them picking up
more as I tumbled, more sticks and stones, but now I had grown so large that I picked up
whatever was in my path, the fern bushes, baby piglets, a goat, a farmers wagon got
caught around my neck and I carried that too down the mountain slope as I tumbled
discovering only a few miles later that I had also picked up the farmers mule as well, and
so I continued to tumble down the mountain side, picking up entire trees by their roots,
crags of volcanic rock, a field of yams which hung from my back like dingle berries, until
I was about to come upon and destroy an entire plantation of banana figs, when I hit upon
one of those depressions of the earth where things mysteriously halt and so with all my
momentum and force which could never have been stopped not by the sea or any
mountain, I hit this depression and there I stopped, resting suddenly in front of the great
plantation house where on the grand but shabby balcony a man appeared, a great white
man with African features, dressed in cloth but gesticulating and articulating in Western
mannerism, he came out I thought to greet me, but no, he came out to admonish me, and
so he proceeded: You have encumbered yourself with all kinds of beast and men, all
kinds of plant and rock, all kinds of shit, so now what Ingersott? You have taken it upon
yourself to gather it all, to put it all upon you shoulders, between your legs, under your
arms and on your back. Why? Where will you go? What will you do know? How does

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it feel to realize that the world was only momentarily in love with your ideas? At what
point did you realize that the world was not trying to keep up with you, but never noticed
you as it passed you by? How does it feel to realize that your drive to understand sanity
would eventually usurp you of your faculties, render your brain helpless? How does it
feel to realize that your obsession with violence would meet its own violent end? the
unrelenting white African man asked. What happens when you finally realize that your
life has been for not, that you delusions of contributing to the knowledge of the world,
no, your delusion of changing knowledge in the world has been revealed, and further
your hope of contributing to progress has been dashed, your place in history but a fleeting
moment whose longevity was flamed more by controversy and hatred than by admiration
and laudation. What happens when you realize that with the collapse of progress there is
a resulting vanishing of history, and so if you had a place, that place is long gone,
vanished, there is no longer a place for you to be revered or reviled, your name will never
appear again in writing as even writing begins to vanish and so not only your name, your
word, you face, your history, but whatever else of your existence has no way to possibly
survive. And so, how do you feel when you realize that the nothingness of death cant
compare to the nothingness of existence, since death at least has a point in time, a point in
existence, whereas nothing else has a point, nothing else has a reference, an idea needs an
ideator, an idea needs a mind, a mind need a person to act like the person in the stadium
punching the beach ball back into the sky. What if we are the first to recognize the end,
not because of our demise but because of our failure to see or imagine a future? What
if

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The wind was deafening

as it howled with a sorrowful fury, the screams of the staff standing over us like dark
angels could barely be heard as they pleaded with us to go to our rooms. In the noise of
the storm his words were now beyond recognition although I remember his mouth
continued to move with his story while his eyes glared straight into mine as his rain
wetted hair slapped and flapped against his face. He looked like a crazed captain on a
ship doomed to capsize. Then came a particularly vicious round of the howling winds
and it was Ingersott, not I, who reached down and turned off the tape recorder and made a
gesture which said, please take this with you before all is lost. To my surprise I obeyed,
puzzled as to why he did not get up with me, he stayed there in his chair, in fact he leaned
back as if he had no intention of leaving, while I was ushered to my room by the visibly
frightened staff, who closed my door after quickly bidding me goodnight, then hurried
away. Once they closed my door, the electricity went out throughout the town as if a
giant candle blown out by the wind, all that accompanied me in the darkness was the
horrible wind itself which hurled itself against the building and thrashed the shutters
which had braced a thousand storms, the sudden and even more terrifying cracks and
crashes of tree limbs being torn from trees, the sudden clattering of metal, a tin roof I
guessed, dancing down the street like a giant meat cleaver, now and again the muffled
and perhaps only perceived cries of what could have been people may have been animals
struck down by the storm.

I awoke

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surprised I could have ever fallen asleep, equally surprised by the calm and quiet, the
light that shone through the cracks in the wooden shutter. I opened a window to a sun lit
but overcast day, the center of the storm? I wondered. I walked out on to the veranda and
looked down into the street which was filled with brown waters rushing with its load of
flotsam to the sea. I walked around the upstairs guest rooms but could find no sign of
anyone. I walked downstairs where again no one was to be seen, no staff, no guests. I
opened the large main door and ventured outside, walking carefully above the rushing
water on a stone ledge, until I reached an elevation above the river in the street. I passed
a small shuttered shop and headed towards two men sitting on plastic pigknuckle buckets,
smoking cigarettes. Have you seen the doctor? I asked them both. Wha? The one man
asked with me a concerned toothless expression. Have you seen the doctor? I asked
again this time holding one hand high over my head to indicate height. Wha? The man
asked again with the same expression on this face. I am looking for the doctor, I said,
have you seen the doctor? I asked again this time holding out my hands in font of my
belly to indicate some abundant girth. Ahhh!!! De Doktor! The man cried out with a
smile. Sho, me know he! De doctor! he shouted to his companion while holding out his
hands in front of his belly to indicate some abundant girth, Sho! Sho! But him us call de
white el-eefant, the man said and both men nodded to each other. Yes, that is him. Have
you seen him? I asked. Sho mon! da white el-eefant he done gone, the man said through
his missing teeth, dat way him done go, he said pointing up the road that led high into the
mistcauled peak of Mt. Misery.

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